November 30, 2023 : Issue #56

WONDERCABINET : Lawrence Weschler’s Fortnightly Compendium of the Miscellaneous Diverse

WELCOME

A visit to a wrenching show at Madrid’s Reina Sofia Museum on the 1995 assassination of Yitzhak Rabin provokes a reflection on that catastrophe’s gruesome afterlife in the present…

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REFLECTIONS

ENOUGH

Over ten years ago now, I had an allergic reaction to a Passover Seder and have not been to one since. It occurred during the ritual celebratory singing of that old holiday standard, “Dayenu,” in which the convening diners rattle off all the things that God had done for us in our liberation from bondage, enumerated by the caller one by one, any one of which would have been, as the congregants lustily sing out in response, “Dayenu!” which is to say “Enough (and yet there was even more!)” at which point the caller goes on to single out the very next of God’s overflowing beneficences. Can you believe it!? Not just one but all of them!

You can sample any number of versions online, though this one, especially over the top, captures the goofily joyous tenor of the whole litany quite nicely.

The thing is, that one time (come to think of it, it might have been around the time of an earlier instantiation of one of these recurrently lopsided Gaza military exchanges), for a change I actually paused to listen to the lyrics—“If he had only brought us out of Egypt and had not carried out judgments against them, dayenu (it would have been enough)” Di-da-yenu, di-da-yenu, di-da-yenu, it would have been enough! “If he had only carried out judgments against them and not against their idols, dayenu!” And onward: if he just destroyed their idols and not killed off all their firstborns, dayenu… If he had just smitten all their firstborns and not given us their wealth. And so forth. Right on through to the parting of the waters and the drowning of the entirety of the Pharoah’s army…

And I’d suddenly found myself brought up short because, wait a second, just what were we celebrating here, this whole story being drenched in righteous slaughter and unconstrained mayhem? And actually, no, not dayenu, not dayenu at all: all way, way too god-awful much! No. I’m sorry but no, no thank you. (“No no thank you, No no thank you, No no thank you, No thank you no thank you.”)

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So anyway, as I say, I’ve pretty much sworn off that particular holiday (even though I’ll grant you that I do miss some of its more countervailing gemütlich humanizing flourishes). But in its secular place I’ve come to especially cherish the coming together afforded by the annual Thanksgiving repast (granted, I realize a not entirely unproblematic occasion in its own right, but still). Only this year, under the horrible pall of all the ongoing carnage and devastation in and around Gaza, the stars seemed particularly out of whack, and in any case, as it happened, my wife and daughter and I happened to find ourselves in three entirely separate European cities on the evening in question (I myself in Madrid for a book festival the next day), and so, by myself and on my own, I instead decided to pass the evening with a visit to the Reina Sofia museum, in part I suppose to commune once again with that grim old warhorse Guernica,

which I must say, felt particularly trenchant this time round, in the context of news reports citing the deaths of more than 14,000 ordinary Gazan civilians so far.

As it happened, though, an even more wrenchingly pertinent revelation awaited me upstairs, for the museum had just opened a long-planned temporary exhibition, taking up the entirety of a long hall,

by the French-based Israeli filmmaker and archival artist Amos Gitai, his 2021 Chronique d’un assasinat, derived in turn from out of imagery originally generated as part of his 1996 film The Arena of Murder which had probed and recreated the events behind the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin the year before, only two years after he and Palestinian leader Yassir Arafat had gathered in Washington DC to sign a series of accords in consummation of the so-called Oslo process which had been the subject of Gitai’s earlier four-part television documentary Give Peace a Chance (1994). The latter had of course culminated with the grizzled 27-year military veteran Rabin’s haunting and haunted address to his Palestinian counterpart Arafat and the others gathered there at the White House signing ceremony on September 23, 1993:

We, the soldiers who have returned from battles stained with blood; we who have seen our relatives and friends killed before our eyes; we who have attended their funerals and cannot look into the eyes of their parents; we who have come from a land where parents bury their children; we who have fought against you, the Palestinians, we say to you today in a loud and a clear voice: Enough of blood and tears.

Enough! We have no desire for revenge, we harbor no hatred toward you. We, like you, are people—people who want to build a home, to plant a tree, to love, to live side by side with you in dignity, in affinity, as human beings, as free men.

Alas, if only. For no sooner had Rabin and Arafat returned home than they began having to contend with hardened activists to either of their flanks who had clearly not yet had enough and were grimly intent on more of the same. On February 25, 1994, during Ramadan, an American Israeli settler named Baruch Goldstein killed 29 unarmed Palestinian civilians engaged in praying at the Cave of the Patriarchs mosque in the occupied West Bank town of Hebron. Because Goldstein had been wearing military fatigues during his attack and carried an assault rifle issued by the IDF and the nearby IDF forces had furthermore failed to intervene to stop him (indeed killing an additional 19 Palestinians in the protests that followed the massacre), and even though Rabin condemned Goldstein’s rampage, Arafat’s Islamicist rivals in Hamas announced that if Israel wasn’t going to discriminate between "fighters and civilians,” then it would be "forced ... to treat the Zionists in the same manner,” whereupon they launched an ever more violent campaign of suicide bombings aimed at soft Israeli targets (buses and the like), which in turn began to turn ever growing portions of the Israeli populace against the whole nascent peace process (for more on all of which, see here).

Which is where Gitai’s installation takes up the story, as Rabin continues to navigate the difficult path toward a fuller peace—including one sequence, for example, where he is portrayed addressing reporters’ questions as to why Israel can’t just pull out of Gaza immediately.

“If we were to leave Gaza unilaterally, without leaving behind a minimum system of security,” he says, “without us there, there would be no electricity, there would not be water, there would not be oxygen in the hospitals, and no medications. Which is why we will have to still stay on in Gaza longer than we might have liked.” (A truly uncanny enumeration, obviously, given that these very necessities would come to constitute the specific targets of the IDF’s current return onslaught into Gaza). Still he endeavors to move the Oslo treaties ever forward toward a vote in the Knesset.

Rabin’s Likud-led opposition meanwhile, launches a series of ever more shrill denunciations (as detailed in Gitai’s successive wall panels):

A few days later, as Netanyahu marches in another protest, demonstrators behind him carry a mock coffin (for more on which, see here). Within a month, in events taken up in Gitai’s Arena of Murder film (and a 2015 follow-up, The Last Day of Yitzhak Rabin):

Bloodstained lyrics to The Song of Peace, found folded in Rabin’s pocket after the assassination.

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Hamas’s campaign continued apace, and six months later, on May 29, 1996, Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party defeated the Labor party of Rabin’s heir Shimon Peres (by a popular vote of 1,501,023 to 1,471,566). At the time the youngest prime minister in the history of Israel, Netanyahu went on to dominate the Israeli political scene for now coming on almost thirty years, systematically dismantling Rabin’s dream, in large part by secretly undergirding Hamas’s control of Gaza in opposition to the Palestinian Authority’s limited sovereignty over the West Bank (notwithstanding the occasional kabuki dance of self-limited armed confrontations), which in turn allowed him to claim that he no longer had a viable unified partner with which to negotiate any sort of lasting peace. Meanwhile, in recent years, (with the collusion of successive American administrations), Netanyahu moved to enter into a series of separate peaces with Israel’s Arab neighbors, further circumventing Palestinian aspirations. On the eve of his greatest success yet in that regard, a separate peace with the murderous Crown Prince Mohamed bin Salman’s Saudi Arabia, Netanyahu’s long-gestating Hamas strategy blew up in his face, as, on October 7th, 2023, the Gazan-based force launched its harrowing single-day assault on Southern Israel, gruesomely butchering over 1,400 Israeli civilians in what quickly started getting likened to the proportional equivalent of thirteen American 9/11’s (a comparison which neatly glossed over the fact that Israel had originally fostered Hamas’s rise as a means of undercutting the Palestinian Authority’s on the West Bank in much the same way that the Americans had once fostered Al Qaeda’s as a means of subverting Soviet control in Afghanistan).

And we all know how things have gone since. As Conor Gearty, a professor of human rights law at the London School of Economics, chronicled in a recent London Review of Books,

The Israeli minister of defence, Yoav Gallant, has declared that he has ‘released all restraints,’ that the Israeli army is ‘fighting human animals and will act accordingly,’ that the plan is to ‘eliminate everything’ and that ‘Gaza won’t return to what it was before.’ Senior Israeli military and government officials have stated that ‘the emphasis is on damage and not on accuracy’ and that ‘there will be no electricity and no water, there will only be destruction. You wanted hell, you will get hell.’

Incidentally, just who is the “you” in that sentence? Hamas, who had for years been dictatorially imposing its will on the Gazan enclave (with the ongoing collusion, as we have seen, of Netanyahu and his allies) or the Gazan people themselves? (And as far as the latter were concerned, how had their lives under strangulating Israeli siege not already been a hell?)

The former head of the Israeli National Security Council, Major General Giora Eiland, has said that ‘creating a severe humanitarian crisis in Gaza is a necessary means to achieve the goal’ and that ‘Gaza will become a place where no human being can exist.’ {…} The Israeli president, Isaac Herzog, has claimed that ‘it’s an entire nation out there that is responsible. It’s not true this rhetoric about civilians not aware, not involved. It’s absolutely not true,’ while Netanyahu has described the conflict as ‘a struggle between the children of light and the children of darkness’ and invoked the biblical injunction to destroy Amalek.

The prophet Samuel’s insistence to Saul, that is, in the Old Teatament’s 1 Samuel 15:1-9, that

This is what the Lord Almighty says: ‘I will punish the Amalekites for what they did to Israel when they waylaid them as they came up from Egypt. Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.’

Even unto the donkeys, for God’s sake? (Regarding which, see my earlier commentary in Issue #53A of this substack.)

But with at least 14,000 Gazans already dead (and that’s not including all those still moldering under the rubble of all the devastation) which is to say over ten times the number of Israelis killed in the original Hamas provocation (a figure which, for what it’s worth, has itself in the meantime been downgraded to 1,200) of which over 65% have been women and children (which is to say definitely not combatants),

with coming on 50% of the enclave’s total housing stock either destroyed or heavily damaged, and 1.7 million of Gaza’s total population of 2.1 million displaced and facing wretched conditions, many of them remanded to tents as winter approaches (“I cannot think of a less Jewish thing than to make another person a refugee,” as Peter Beinert recently commented to Ezra Klein), Rabin’s question does begin to reassert itself as to just when enough is going to be enough.

For the rest of us, at least, if not yet for the Israelis themselves, whose leaders assure us that, give or take a few more days of hostage-swapping pause, they are just itching to resume combat to the bitter end.

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Meanwhile, one of the most consistently moving and revealing accounts of what all this has been like for an individual Gazan civilian to be living through can be found in The Guardian’s ongoing sampling of the daily diary of a 35-year-old Palestinian named Ziad who, in entry 23, back on November 20, urged the rest of us:

10pm When you get into the shower, and you feel cold, appreciate that first drop of hot water over your body.

When you are about to eat a meal, look at the plates, give yourself time to let the beautiful smells of the food in, admire what you have, the variety of colours. And the taste.

When you are in your house, hug the walls. Yes, hug the walls. Be grateful to have a roof over your head.

Because, even though these details are minor, yet for many, they are a dream. Believe me, if you have a good meal, access to basic needs, and a normal mundane routine, you own the whole world.

Talk about Dayenu!

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ANIMAL MITCHELL
Cartoons by David Stanford, from the Animal Mitchell archive

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