Letter From Jerusalem: Bibi the Collaborationist

I

 

“The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is, alas, the place where critical thinking goes to die.”

—Susie Linfield, Salmagundi, #222-223, 2024

 

When Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, we were all lost and terrified—spending a majority of our time indoors. Those who sprang into action usually did one of two things: either they went to the front, first to the south and then to the north, or established civilian command centers to help people affected by the hostilities, whether they were refugees, survivors of the massacre, or families whose members had been called up for duty. It was clear that this kind of activity was not sanctioned by politicians and that, given more time, they would have found a way to shut the initiative down. The two main civilian command centers, in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, had been established with existing infrastructure from the country’s largest protest groups, both of which had opposed Benjamin Netanyahu’s rule as well as his new government’s judicial reform. The spirit of social and cultural resistance was palpable.

Everyone was volunteering precisely because Bibi, as he’s called in Israel, and his cronies had abandoned the country’s civilians to Hamas’s barbarity. The feeling was that Israelis were caught between two despotic rulers, Bibi on one side and Hamas’s Yahya Sinwar on the other, with many trying to maneuver their personal lives despite sensing that they were little more than cannon fodder for a battle of egos. It took several days for the infiltrators to be either killed or pushed back into Gaza, where civilians began bearing the brunt of the fighting. Israelis were caught in an existential panic that left them unconcerned about casualties on the Palestinian side—and Hamas, which refuses to differentiate between civilian deaths and those of its militants, continued its policy of using civilian infrastructure for military purposes. Without anyone saying it openly, it seemed that the value of life became secondary to a new form of nihilistic heroism unleashing an unprecedented outbreak of death and destruction.

Bibi seemed shaken for a day or two after the initial attack. But it didn’t take long for him to get back in the driver’s seat. Things didn’t need to go well, either for him or for the country, they just had to be under his control. This had been his policy for fifteen years. Israelis were caught far deeper in the grips of a megalomaniac leader than most had known. It turned out that all of the concepts with which we had been living—deterrence, occupation, peace process—had been thrown out with the bathwater years ago and replaced with political repression and de facto annexation. The idea of Jewish hegemony in Israel, which fuels how people abroad see Israelis, was like the idea of French hegemony in Vichy France. Yes, there were French citizens who supported its regime, but society as a whole lived under repressions that limited freedom. As a conceptual framework, the idea that the Jewish state exists to protect Jews no longer reflects reality. Jews in Israel are living under a hostile regime. Their lives are increasingly in danger both from within and without.

With these thoughts in mind, I turned to the writings of Albert Camus from Combat, the French Resistance newspaper where he worked during WWII. Sitting down to read, I focused on how the experience of living under a hostile regime within one’s boundaries found its expression in writing—and how, after the liberation of Paris, the issues that had arisen during the war began being formulated. Because, I realized, we are not just fighting a war against Hamas. We are also in the midst of an internal struggle—a societal civil war that threatens to turn violent at any moment.

I began with Camus’s writings from just before the liberation of Paris in August 1944 and into the following months. And I was struck by certain sentiments that tracked almost flawlessly with our own situation. From a certain viewpoint, it seemed, the experience of war truly was similar wherever and whenever it took place—the human issues were often the same ones regardless of radical changes in time and space. Removing the specifics out of the text, it read like something that had been written by someone living through in our own times.

Just as Hamas terrorists drove into towns and villages killing masses of innocents, so Camus wrote of the Ascq massacre, in which, “For three hours, minute after minute, without letup, in a single … village, shots were fired one after another and bodies fell writhing to the ground.” Just as Israelis share horrific images, many created by Hamas as part of its assault, to get across the enemy’s depravity, so Camus notes, “This is the image that must be kept in mind so that nothing is forgotten, the image that must be shown to any … who remain on the sidelines.” And just as there was a feeling in Israel that Hamas and its leaders had to face justice for their deeds, so Camus insists: “The image of this village soaked in blood and from this day forth populated solely by widows and orphans should suffice to assure us that someone will pay for this crime.” These are not the calm reflections of a writer or intellectual looking back on events. They are not the words of a person living in terror, where merely writing them could get him killed.

Yet the terror with which Camus had to contend was not limited to that posed by the Nazis. He also had to contend with the Vichy regime, which purported to represent his own people, but which also enabled the atrocities committed by Germany. Here, too, the similarities between his relation to Vichy and how many Israelis have experienced the current government are uncanny.

Just as Israel’s so-called Minister of National Security—an ex-con named Itamar Ben Gvir—hands out machine guns to civilians while supporting independent militia groups, so Camus noted that the Milice, a political paramilitary organization created by the Vichy regime, “enlists crime on behalf of treason.” Endowing criminals with authority allows the Vichy regime to maintain its hold on power—harming its own people. This isn’t just political treason. It’s moral treason too. It’s no surprise to many in Israel that a man arrested for sexual assault at gunpoint had received his weapon under Ben Gvir’s lax rules. Or that an armed civilian who stopped a terrorist attack was then himself killed by an off-duty soldier recruited from the radical settler group to which Ben Gvir had belonged in his youth. Bibi had said then, “As soon as you hand out weapons in larger numbers, the kinds of events that people warn about can happen. But to the same degree we know that in previous waves of terror … the presence of armed civilians saved the situation many times and prevented a major disaster… .And so I think that, in the current situation, we have to continue this policy, I certainly support it. We may pay a price for it—that’s life.” A lot of noise was made about Bibi’s indifference to the killed civilian. A lot of people, including the dead man’s father, began to speculate that Bibi did not know the details of what happened. But it didn’t bring a critical mass of Israel’s population to understand that these were morally treasonous words—and that they revealed precisely the kind of attitude that had allowed October 7 to take place in the first place.

People failed to see that an ideological line could be traced between the terrorist and the soldier who, despite his intention to protect Jews, ended up killing one instead. It was still unclear to many that Bibi and Ben Gvir were intentionally undermining the social pillars on which actual security depended. Camus’s description of the Milice actually went a long way to capturing the threat that emanated from an approach to politics that, ultimately, enables rather than counteracts one’s enemies. “Their job,” he writes of the militia’s members, “was to prove that human dignity is a lie and that the idea of a self-conscious individual, master of his own fate, is but a democratic myth.” This was exactly what Bibi and Ben Gvir were trying to achieve: quashing human dignity by limiting democracy.

 

II

 

“The occupation is a political and moral failure of phenomenal proportions. I have no problem calling it a crime.”

—Susie Linfield

 

In another section, Camus notes that illiberal forces “have a very specific mission … to demonstrate by their own example and by making an example of others that people are made to live in chains and terror.” Again a line is traced between the threat from without and the threat from within: the terror of the oppressive enemy and the chains of one’s own oppressors. In our case, the two are ostensibly at odds—Bibi is fighting against Sinwar—but the logic of internal oppression remains directly bound to the constancy of the external threat. Fighting terror becomes a way of facilitating terror. Ben Gvir, the ostensible terror-hater, ends up deploying another form of terror.

This inextricable connection between Bibi and Sinwar goes all the way back to the Gilad Shalit deal in which the arch-terrorist was released from prison. Even then, before anyone understood its real implications, the idea was to pay whatever price needed to be paid at any given moment to buy time in order to consolidate power. Soon the price was not security prisoners but cash, which Bibi used to buy more time and which turned into a conduit for the October 7 attack. Bibi’s political Ponzi scheme did show some cracks in 2014, during the last major war with Hamas, when tensions emerged within the security cabinet. And Bibi did what he always did: he distanced those who challenged him from real power centers and continued to channel cash to Hamas to buy himself some more time.

Years passed until Bibi became a collaborator in Sinwar’s plan to attack Israel on its territory. What’s the proof that Bibi was fully aware of Hamas’s objective and still continued to send suitcase after suitcase of cash? There’s no need for secret documents leaked to the press. Bibi reports it in his own 2022 memoir: “Hamas intended to surprise us and to infiltrate Israel using hundreds of terrorists at once, who would go into kindergartens and schools, kill Israelis, and drag dozens of hostages back into the Gaza Strip through the tunnels.” He adds: “Had they succeeded in their plans, the result could have been catastrophic.” They succeeded. The results were catastrophic. Yet Bibi retains his approach and continues to buy time. And if anything has become clear, it’s that every time Bibi buys himself time, he never takes the payment out of his own pocket.

The similarities between Bibi’s conduct and Camus’s writings about France’s Vichy regime are, at times, very eerie. Camus speaks of its leaders as ones “who governed against the nation for so long that in the end they forgot about it,” of how they “combined hypocrisy with terror,” and how, “in certain circumstances there is no difference between treason and resignation.” This tracks back to the situation in Israel, where Bibi—whose Ponzi scheme left him with only the most extreme ideologues and basest criminals in his government—resigned himself to leading the country into the abyss. For the first nine months of 2023, he headed a judicial coup that would have neutered the independence of the courts, all the while—despite repeated warnings from the security establishment—refusing to say that he would do anything to avoid the constitutional showdown that he was engendering. In the end, he turned out to be one of the actors who laid the groundwork for October 7. Maybe, having put it in a memoir that he wrote while in the political opposition for a single year, Bibi believed he had relegated the potential of a Hamas attack on Israel to history. In reality, it was his future.

In another section, speaking of a diplomat who readily represented the Vichy regime when it took over, Camus notes that “in politics, realism is always right, even if it is morally wrong.” This was Bibi’s doctrine for decades. He was ready to work with the most illiberal and undemocratic elements of the Israeli political spectrum to keep his hold on power. But Camus also noted that “political realism is a degrading thing.” Bibi still controlled the country’s political reins, giving every party in his interest-based coalition the budget and authority it sought to pursue its goals, but it steadily degraded him. His Ponzi scheme could not continue indefinitely. He’d given too much to too many parties—including his enemies. While he was busy keeping his grip on power, they were preparing to put all of the resources he’d been funneling to them to use, pulling him and the rest of the country straight into the nightmarish reality he had helped to create.

 

III

 

“Two states is, I believe, the only real solution. But anyone who thinks that will happen any time soon is seriously deluded.”

—Susie Linfield

 

October 7 pulled the rug out from under everyone’s feet—and Bibi was not spared. A vision built on cynicism must always be vulnerable to the truth—which, in this case, is that Hamas and its allies intend to destroy Israel, and that Palestinians, dispossessed for decades, deserve more from Israel than to have their internal oppressors strengthened at their expense. Yet October 7, as an experience, seemed like a reminder of WWII wrapped up into days, weeks, and months. From the first day, people compared the massacres in southern Israel to the Holocaust, while, within weeks, Israel’s bombing of Gaza and the high count of civilian deaths led to accusations of genocide. Reading Camus’s reports just after Paris’s liberation only strengthened this impression, further exposing Bibi’s role in the disaster.

In Camus’s piece on the Vichy diplomat, whom he calls “a practitioner of political realism” not unlike Bibi, he states: “There are times … when morality comes back into politics, because people start suddenly paying for their politics with their blood.” As the carnage of the day of the attack was slowly revealed, as the torture of the hostages came into focus, and as the ongoing toll that the ground invasion took on people who, until October 7, lived ordinary lives with dreams, pains, and hopes, people increasingly faced the fact that Bibi’s so-called realism, which sounded so convincing for so long despite being wrong, came with a cost Israeli society could not bear. Yet with this realization, says Camus, comes genuine change, as “overnight realism becomes wrong” and a “time of morality” enters politics, which can no longer accommodate lies. As for Bibi, like the Vichy diplomat, “his intelligence was not enough to protect him from the unpardonable blindness that has cut him off from the nation forever”—which, inevitably, is the fate that awaits Bibi at the moment that he is finally brought down.

 

But that moment has not yet come. And, like a liberated Paris caught in the midst of a WWII still raging throughout Europe, Israeli society is still struggling against the same illiberal forces that have defined its political landscape for fifteen years. For all that time, as Camus writes of Vichy, Israel has been “not democracy but a caricature of democracy.” This can only change if the forces of cultural resistance succeed in unseating Bibi and his ilk. As Camus wrote of members of the French Resistance, “the affairs of this country should be managed by those who paid and answered for it.” This is what he means when he says, “we are determined to replace politics with morality.” He envisions what it will take to rebuild society after the fall of Vichy: “We are going to attempt, lawfully, honestly, day after day, to rebuild what they destroyed, to restore the incomparable and hidden face of the nation.” This is what could be in store for Israelis once it is possible to remove Bibi from power.

The problem that illiberal regimes create for those who want to live in open societies consists of the need to bring them down in a manner that is not inconsistent with democratic values and principles in the first place. It involves, as Camus pointed out, “preserving liberty even when it benefits those who always fought against it.” It also involves what Camus calls “a crime not foreseen by any law … the crime of not doing enough.” Bibi did not do enough to protect his citizens. And it wasn’t by mistake. It was his policy.

Adam Raz laid this case out rather clearly just weeks after the October 7 attacks. In a piece titled, “A Brief History of the Netanyahu-Hamas Alliance,” he enumerated the many ways that Bibi purposefully helped the militant totalitarian regime strengthen its hold on Gaza. As he put it, Bibi’s approach to Hamas in Gaza “created symbiosis between the flowering of fundamentalist terrorism and preservation of Netanyahu’s rule,” suggesting that “Benjamin Netanyahu and Hamas have an unspoken political alliance.” Unspoken, perhaps, but conscious. Maybe Bibi was taken aback by the October 7 attacks because he thought there was an understanding between himself and Sinwar that neither one would go as far as putting the other’s rule in jeopardy. Sinwar may have seen Bibi as an accomplice, but not a partner. And while criminals can work together, it is often a matter of time before one double-crosses the other. Bibi was under the impression that he could continue to collaborate with Hamas in order to, as he himself said during a Likud meeting in 2019, “prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state.” This in itself suggests that, like the Vichy regime, Bibi aimed to take over Israel and to establish a new regime that would control Israelis and Palestinians from above.

The war being fought now in Israel’s south, and that has spread to every other border, initially brought Israeli society together after years of division. But this unity frayed as soon as Bibi turned a national conflict into a personal war. “Some say that we can make war only if we are united,” wrote Camus of the ongoing fight against Germany, and yet, as he also noted, “That is true only if people are willing to understand one another.” People came together after the October 7 attacks. But it has not yet become clear that they ever understood what their division was all about in the first place. Israeli society did not have a chance really to understand and acknowledge the significance of democracy as a founding principle of the state. And, as Camus also said, “one cannot wage democracy’s war abroad while suppressing democracy at home.” Our nation underwent a sustained attack on its democracy for over a decade, one that was being directed from within while we were collaborating with our enemies from without, so that fighting a brutal totalitarian entity in the south while maintaining the principles of democracy at home is now a combination of self-defense from without and self-preservation from within.

Unity, Camus saw after the liberation, was not enough. “To wage war … requires not only unity but also truth. There is now but one war for all of us, and that is the war of truth.” Behind the image of innocent civilians, Israelis are fighting a brutal and menacing enemy on the front lines in Gaza. But they are also struggling against a calculating and heartless ruler of their own. As Camus noted just a month after Paris’s liberation, “in history as in other realms, genius never lies in falsehood but is contained entirely within truth aware of its own power.” There is no way to end this complicated and devastating war without being aware of the value of truth in this conflict. “The enormous task … calls for both the power that comes from unity and the power that comes from free criticism.” Without being able also to criticize ourselves, and especially our leaders, our unity will not suffice.

Bibi’s repeated attempts to stamp out criticism and debate, to quash an imperfect yet dynamic democracy, have only partially succeeded as they have also fomented a social and political crisis that has only grown in scope—and which now has to contend with the deadliest day in Israeli history as well as its horrific aftermath. “We are convinced,” stated Camus, “that there are times when we each have to argue with ourselves and sacrifice our emotional tranquility. This is one of those times.” Yes, this is one of those times when we have to abandon our desire for a quieter life, and accept the political turmoil that is our inheritance. We have no choice but to sacrifice our emotional well-being in the short run for the sake of our social and national well-being in the long run.

Bibi has done everything in his power, including collaborating with a sworn enemy, to avoid the creation of a Palestinian state. The people of Israel’s south paid for this policy with their lives, their livelihoods, and their loved ones. There is little left and no way to return while Hamas remains in power—which will continue to be the case since Bibi now understands that, by promising its destruction, he has backed himself into the creation of a Palestinian state. Sinwar has check-mated Bibi. But he has not vanquished Israeli society. Our country has always had to live with extreme paradoxes. And yet, as Camus said, “a nation that has chosen to live with such wrenching contradictions can save itself only by openly dealing with those contradictions.” We have to find some way to deal directly with the legacy of this country’s past—its establishment, its wars, its occupation, and its liberation. As soon as we liberate the Palestinians, we liberate ourselves. For, as Camus added, “If this country is incapable of achieving victory and truth at the same time … then we would have no choice but to conclude that we are lost.” Israel is not yet lost. It can choose to find itself.

One of the ideas that was central to Camus both after the liberation of Paris and also at the end of The Plague, the novel in which he turned his war experiences into a myth of modern disease, was that evil never dies, and destructive forces always lurk somewhere nearby. “Let us have,” he wrote, “the wisdom to foresee that no victory is definitive.” Bibi, now that he is on the spot, would have us believe otherwise. He has taken to saying that the war will continue until it achieves “absolute victory.” In fact, he is saying that the war will never end, because as soon as it does, he will have to contend with the destruction—both in Israel and in Gaza—which he has helped to sow.

Bibi and Sinwar would do well together in a jail cell. But it would entail some authority seizing them both and putting them there. And while it’s clear that the two culprits created a sort of alliance to further their separate interests, it’s not clear whether there’s a counter-alliance that could usher in a new political reality. We hear of potential political rebels within Bibi’s party who may be willing to bring down his government. We see polls predicting that Bibi would lose an election if it were being held today. What polls can’t predict, and what bringing down the government can’t prevent, is the manipulation that he will deploy ahead of the next election cycle. Without a deep commitment by the people in this place to democracy, not only as a form of government but as a human value, we will not break out of the pathological cycle of Bibi-ism that has possessed Israel. Bibi knew the system well enough to hack into its mainframe. He has since rewritten the code so thoroughly that it no longer functions as originally intended. The only option is to reboot the system as a whole.

As Camus wrote, “our chief desire in life was to be not just voters but human beings.” We want to be politically and socially active without having to lose our humanity. Removing Bibi from power—like exiling Sinwar—will only lead to a pause in the fighting. What Israelis and Palestinians need, both, is a vision. The leaders who would offer a path forward that can be trusted have not yet appeared.

Camus continued to write in Combat for days, weeks, and months after the liberation of Paris. He repeatedly reminded his readers that “to fight a democratic war, one must seek a democratic peace,” that “the language of free people is the language of clarity,” and that “political realism cannot be the future.” These are all ideas we need to hear today too, as much as we need to remember that, in Israel’s war with Hamas, “we can win without hatred, fight while holding violence in contempt.” Hatred will lower us to a level lower than our enemies, keep us on the path of demagoguery, and prevent us from rebuilding a society that can thwart threats with a powerful combination of resilience and honesty. “We have no perverse taste,” Camus declared, “for a world of violence and tumult in which we squander what is best in ourselves in hopeless conflict.” Neither do we.