[Bialik, Hayim Nahman. On the Slaughter (p. 30). (Function). Kindle Edition. ]
Get up and go to the city of slaughter and come to the yards
and see with your own eyes and run your hands along the fences
and trees and stones, and across the walls’ plaster,
and touch the dried blood and stiJened tissue spilled from skulls of the fallen.
And from there come to the ruins, step over the gouges, pass by the pockmarked walls
and bashed-in ovens to the place where the hammer fell and fissures opened
baring the burnt brick and blackened stone
which look like gaping mouths, like dark and mortal wounds
that won’t be dressed and will not know any balm.
Your feet will sink into feathers; you’ll stumble over heaps of slivers and shards,
and the tattered remnants of books and scrolls,
the fruit of great learning and labor and craft—obliterated, all.
For my sins I beat my breast. Perhaps for the sins of my literature teacher in seventh grade.
In my childhood, Bialik – whom she insisted on reading to us with pathos – bored me. It took
more than 65 years for these lines to send a shiver down my spine and bring tears to my eyes.
1 The title of the poem written by Israel’s national poet, Ḥayyim Naḥman Bialik, in memory of the brutal
pogroms against the Jews of Kishinev, Russia, in 1903, is: “In the City of Slaughter.”
Never – but never in my life – would I have believed that I would read them over the ruins of a
Palestinian village that had fallen victim to a pogrom by Jewish Cossacks.[1]
And so the poem continues (in its various allusions directed, one way or another, at most of
us)
But do not linger with that debris. Move on, along the road
where the acacia has come into bloom before you and the air wafts fragrance,
the flowers like down, their scent like blood,
and your fury notwithstanding, their strange incense
ushers a softness of spring into your heart—and it doesn’t repulse you.
With ten thousand golden arrows, the sun pierces your liver as,
from each splinter of glass, seven rays glimmer with glee in your doom—
for the Lord has called to the spring and the slaughter as one:
the sun rose, the acacia blossomed, and the slaughterer slaughtered.
[Bialik, Hayim Nahman. On the Slaughter (p. 30). (Function). Kindle Edition.]
Bialik knew something about the psyche of the masses.
My father, who was the only one of his entire family to be saved from extermination by the
Germans – among them his neighbors, friends, teachers, employers, who turned their gaze
aside when his parents were led to the death camps – was a kind of Holocaust denier. It was
not enough for him that he had been saved. I think he also wanted to save the life of the “good
object.” One can understand him – besides this, not much was left to him. He escaped by
the skin of his teeth with only a scratched Leica camera hanging from his neck and landed
as an illegal immigrant in the port of JaJa. It is no wonder that he wished to create for me –
his only son – a good world of people who believe in goodness. Spoiler – had he succeeded,
I assume I would not have become a psychoanalyst. ‘Well then’… he used to say – ‘there were
also good Germans, you know’. In later years I asked, with growing defiance as I matured:
really? Who? Give me one name! One? There was one who came to his mind every time I
asked. Professor Jürgens (let us say) – he was the head of the painting department at the art
academy in Berlin where my father studied as a young student. He summoned him to his
oJice in late 1937 and said to him: “I think you’d better leave here. It’s going to become
dangerous here for Jews.” My father never forgot this kindness – and I? In my sins I have
turned and turned this memory over ever since. More and more, a suspicion crept into my
heart. Did he want to save my father, or perhaps gently expel him from his academy? And you
know what? Until my father’s dying day I did not dare check this with him. I was afraid of
ruining for him the one thing he had managed to rescue from the forces of absolute evil.
Please do not jump out of your skin. I know. Heaven forbid that I compare what is happening
in our country to the rise of Nazism and to the discourse of 1939. Heaven forbid that I
compare those aJectionately called “hilltop youth” to the Hitlerjugend… although they too –
you know – were the ‘children of everyone’ – of all the Germans… And still, no. Not every
injustice that Jews inflict on their Arab neighbors is supposed to evoke the Holocaust. And
even without cynicism, the Holocaust has its own place of honor and indeed we must
remember that Jews never carried out a massacre of the kind committed on October 7th
against Germans before they became the object of their hatred – but between us – does that
matter? What we are crying out about here is something else. About the marvelous capacity
of a mass – the society – to ignore an elephant in the square even when it begins to rampage
and trample all those who had been thorns in its side.
I am reminded of Yeshayahu Leibowitz.
In 1967 I was a teenager. A full participant in the great cries of joy of the Six-Day War. Already
on the second day of the victory celebrations Leibowitz warned of the need to return the
territories immediately. “Any rule over another people is corrupting,” he declared
emphatically. If we do not return the territories at once, we will end up becoming
“Judeo-Nazis.” And the country erupted. I leaf through newspaper clippings while preparing
my talk here – here is a headline: “I do not regret my words,” says Leibowitz. No, you do not
need to regret your words. And I look back with the sadness reserved for those lucky – or
unlucky – enough to live long enough to see the prophecies of doom descend for landing
upon reality. At what point exactly did we stop talking about land for peace? When did we
begin to fall in love with the idea that one can also not give it back? That one can also do
without peace? That one can do without law? That one can do without justice? That one can
do without mutual responsibility between human beings? When did we begin to believe that
October 7th was a wake-up call – that we would rise from our slumber to welcome the
Messiah, who, as is well known, has an unfortunate habit of coming in blood and fire and
pillars of smoke?
“I,” says Leibowitz, “I am among those human beings who believe that the Messiah
will-c-o-m-e. He will come! In the future. Any messiah who comes is a false messiah,
because the very essence of the Messiah is that he w-i-l-l-c-o-m-e.”
The red line – the Rubicon from which there is no return – is of course never crossed. We only
approach it more and more. Now it is already within visual range, dangerously close… hot,
hot, heating up… closer. One can already see it with the naked eye… and then one bright day
we wake up to discover that it is already far behind us – and we, of course, never crossed it.
And that day is already here. It has already been. For a long time.
But let us be a bit less poetic and speak also of deeds and facts.
OCHA (United Nations OJice for the Coordination of Humanitarian AJairs) reports over 110
settler attacks that caused harm to life and property during the last month of January. During
this period eight Palestinians were killed in settler attacks across the West Bank, in addition
to many injured and to forced displacements following settler violence. A UN spokesperson
noted that in the entire year 2025 more than 1,800 settler attacks causing casualties or
damage to property were documented, the highest daily average since 2006.
– 24 January 2026 – in Qusra, Nablus district, settlers from a new outpost broke in and
violently entered residents’ homes, abusing and humiliating local residents. A clash erupted,
settlers fired, and the army entered the village, fired gas, raided homes and beat
Palestinians. The incident is described as part of a pattern of organized raids on villages, with
the use of live fire and military presence accompanying a civilian attack.
On 27 January 2026 – several villages in the Masafer Yatta area (Firing Zone 918), in the South
Hebron Hills, were attacked. About 100 settlers raided four communities (Khirbet al-Fakheit,
Halawa, Mirkez and at-Tuwani), assaulted residents with sticks with knives attached to
them, stole about 300 sheep, burned about 3 tons of firewood, and vandalized homes and
vehicles. Six Palestinians were reported beaten and injured, among them a child and two
women.
Statistics tend to pass by the ear – so one more:
On 14 March 2026 – in Qusra, Nablus district, settlers – some of them armed – pelted a house
with stones and then shot at Palestinians in the village, killing one person and wounding at
least two; property damage was also caused.
The information currently available points to one particularly large and documented attack
in Deir al-Hatab, on the night between 22–23 March 2026. The attack took place as part of a
coordinated wave of settler raids on Palestinian villages in the West Bank. The immediate
background, according to reports, was a funeral in the Elon Moreh outpost for Yehuda
Sherman, an 18-year-old settler who was killed in a collision with a Palestinian vehicle;
settlers claimed it was a deliberate attack. Large groups of settlers entered the village of Deir
al-Hatab, east of Nablus, at night; footage shows dozens of settlers running into a
neighborhood and towards houses, setting fire to vehicles and homes, smashing windows
and bars, and setting buildings ablaze. According to the Palestinian Red Crescent at least
one house was completely burned and at least 20 houses and 30 vehicles were severely
damaged. Aid organizations and media described the attack as taking place during the Eid
al-Fitr holiday, when families were at home, and fires broke out in inhabited houses.
According to residents quoted by the BBC, settlers shot at the house and set it on fire while
the family was inside, and they escaped to the roof; the event is described as “a coordinated
act of terror” intended also to kill women and children, not only to burn property. Soldiers in
a nearby watchtower did not intervene while the settlers descended into the village; only
later did ambulances and firefighters arrive.
Have I already lost some of you? Is there among you someone who thinks: “Well, they are
not exactly saints either,” is there?
I shall say a psychoanalytic word about the ‘discursive field’ in which we find ourselves and
why I fear I have already lost some of you. The nature of discourse-fields ought to be among
psychoanalysis’ concerns at this time. As I understand the situation, we are living in a reality
in which there is a combined, simultaneous assault by an external enemy – a “bad object”
– that threatens to annihilate us physically, while an internal enemy – an internal bad
object – threatens to annihilate our psychic life. The former seeks to kill us. The latter
seeks to crush our identity, our values and to control our thoughts. It seems to me that what
is interesting in this statement is that most of its listeners would agree with it. In Israeli
society there would probably be wall-to-wall agreement regarding the identity of the external
bad object – and there would also be broad agreement regarding the gravity of the danger.
The dispute would concern only the identity of the internal bad object. Opponents of
Netanyahu – the camp called “liberal” – will identify it with the Bibists and the
poison-machine they operate in their master’s name. Netanyahu’s staunch supporters will
identify it with the “Kaplanists” and with the Arabs, without much distinction between them.
In their eyes they are all traitors and worthy of death. The curses on social networks testify to
this.
What characterizes such a field is that if you rise up against injustices inflicted on Jews, all
the friends of Palestine will rise up against you. And if you stand by the Palestinians, by the
slaughter inflicted upon them and the injustices perpetrated nightly in the territories – you
will immediately lose the Jews. And if you adopt a sweeping position condemning the killing
of the helpless and the plunder and abuse of the defenseless on both sides – both sides
will condemn you. And to be honest, even we – those who stand by all victims of violence –
do not feel within ourselves the same feelings toward both sides. In a strange way we
discover that even among us who condemn injustices wherever they occur, there are those
whose anger at injustices inflicted upon our own people is much greater than at those
inflicted on the other side (even when they condemn them) – and conversely, there are those
among us whose anger and terror at injustice we inflict on others is much greater than at the
injustices inflicted upon us. And this is exactly the phenomenon that breathes life into the
hatred between the camps and creates an unbridgeable split.
It is hard to imagine a more worrying and thanatological discursive field than this. At the time
of writing, the main common denominator that serves as glue within both camps – in Israeli
society and in Palestinian society alike – is apparently mutual hatred. Even those whose
souls do not recoil from injustices and from the trampling of human dignity and liberty must
see that all the materials of a civil war are already here. All the alarm mechanisms are
flashing red lights, indicating that the “fusion” work of Eros and Thanatos – for which the
nuclear reactor supplying all our psychic energy is responsible – has gone out of control and
is approaching a state in which the “compound” being produced is tending toward a
death-culture – and has already produced a social and political Chernobyl. This situation
calls, with an emergency cry, for an agreed third who can contain all the torn parts of the
system, who will act to neutralize its toxicity, to seal the doors and boundary-spaces that
have been breached, in order to restore to the reactor-complex the capacity to contain the
radioactive materials leaking from it. This is the function of the leader – and yet not only does
our leaders not act thus, he acts in the opposite direction. The prime minister and his
ministers seem to be actively promoting the collapse of the reactor and are deliberately
creating the leaks.
To avoid any doubt, this description does not refer to a Phantasy of destructiveness but to
destructiveness that is taking place in the real. The enemy that seeks to annihilate us
from within as from without is in the real. Not “either-or” but “both-and.” And such an
enemy cannot be defeated by words alone. It requires action – and action, let us admit,
arouses very real anxiety. I believe that most of the people gathered here today abhor
violence – and acting against violence requires a readiness to confront the violence within
ourselves. Precisely for this reason it is so easy for us to be persuaded to avert our gaze.
For my sins I beat my breast. I have not changed my humanitarian values over the years, but
I did not go out into the streets with the intensity with which I do so in recent years – that is,
only once my own people became the victims of unbearable injustices. And yet more than
once I thought and even said that everything happening in the occupied territories would
eventually seep beyond the Green Line. I said – I said. I said it to discharge my duty of action
– instead of acting. Therefore, there is no escape from stepping out of the comfort zone of
the preacher at the gate.
The Orwellian discursive field in which we find ourselves is the kind of field that Robert Langs
– an American psychoanalyst – calls a type C field, in which words do not function as carriers
of meaning but as a kind of computer virus intended to destroy meaning. The massive
assault on formal structures and formal role-holders, and the systematic crushing of law and
of reality-testing, cause the thinking of the individual to be hijacked by mass thinking, and
mass thinking to be governed by the standards of primary thinking – unconscious thinking.
And here is what characterizes unconscious thinking, among other things: any memory or
representation charged with a similar aJect can be substituted for any other analogous
representation. Logical connections and hierarchical orders of cause and eJect, earlier and
later, similar and diJerent, good and bad, truth and falsehood, policeman and thief –
collapse. Therefore in such a field everything that happens “outside” happens
simultaneously “inside.” So I thought had happened to us. It took us two days to expel the
Nukhba terrorists from the Gaza envelope. Only ten months passed and, to my dismay, it
turned out that they had infiltrated our minds and taken control of our brains – when the
event that will forever be suspected of being a horrific abuse of a detainee in the Sde Teiman
camp came to light. This is apparently the nature of collective trauma. It infects twice. Once
when it turns you into its eternal victim. Once when the dormant virus of identification with
the aggressor that has been incubating within you for 80 years erupts at once.
In the psychotic-surreal field in which we are floating, a gallows is already hovering. Pogroms
are already taking place. There are already religious sages preaching genocide and
annihilation, all in the name of the divine promise. They are in Iran. They are among us.
You know what? I feel like addressing you, hilltop youth. You who believe that you are the
army of God – and I will speak again in the name of Leibowitz:
“For the Lord is the owner of the earth and all that fills it – and therefore by His will He took it
from the Canaanites and gave it to Israel, and by His will He took it from Israel and gave it to
the Romans, and by His will He took it from the Romans and gave it to the Arabs, and by His
will He took it from the Arabs and gave it to the Crusaders, and by His will He took it from the
Crusaders and gave it to the Mamluks, and by His will He took it from the Mamluks and gave
it to the Turks, and by His will He took it from the Turks and gave it to the British – and again
we appear as litigants. The deep meaning of that midrash is that no nation has a right to any
land, for the owner of every land is the Lord.”
If only the rabbis of territory and messianism – those who present themselves as Jews –
would internalize even a shred of this.
And I shall allow myself one more small interpretation of my own in conclusion. It seems to
me that the meaning of the fear expressed by God lest the human being who tastes from the
fruit of the Tree of Knowledge will be like Him (and if he also tastes from the Tree of Life it will
no longer be possible to distinguish between them) – it seems to me that this was not meant
literally. It seems to me that what was meant is that the human being who tastes from the
fruit of the Tree of Knowledge will always be able to create God in his own image and likeness
and then go out in His name and burn a family with its infant, as in the terrible Duma attack,
one of whose accused has become dear to the heart of the minister in the government – and
for this purpose – to prevent this terrible injustice – it is right that we go to extremes and
endanger our comfort.