Targeted himself by the Israel lobby for antisemitism, Professor John Keane analyses the nature of Zionist revenge.
Ever since October 7th 2023, on several continents, courts of law have been weaponised as never before by groups wanting to silence the public critics of Israel’s genocidal crimes against the Palestinians.
What motivates these groups to misuse courts to coerce and conquer their opponents? Aside from obvious ethical and political disagreements with their adversaries, the urge to intimidate and silence them, and dreams of big financial windfalls into already deep pockets, is there something deeper going on?
Why on earth do otherwise civilised people who are proud to call themselves Zionist supporters of the state of Israel fight tooth and nail against the critics of genocide by dragging them through high-profile legal cases which can destroy public reputations, ruin family life, get victims sacked, leave them bankrupt, and force them publicly to apologise for crimes they’ve allegedly committed?
Naturally, Zionists aren’t always agreed on the fundamentals of their cases; and lengthy and costly courtroom trial sessions often reveal serious disagreements about matters of fact and law and the meaning of Zionism. But here’s my question: is revenge, a strong word, the right word needed to understand one of the deeper shared motives of today’s lawfare warriors?
What is revenge?
Common sense tells us that an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, getting even, is perfectly normal human behaviour. It isn’t. It’s a psycho-political malady. Avengers dwell in a dark world of trauma, hurt, hatred, power, and the lust for retaliation. Their wish for revenge is obsessive; avengers are enslaved by their vengefulness.
Deep down, those who seek revenge are narcissistically gripped by painful feelings of a past unbearable injustice which they or their kin suffered as victims. Their narcissism is malignant. They think of themselves as self-righteously entitled to make amends for their hurt. They are perfect victims to whom the whole world owes a huge favour. As the Jewish philosopher Theodor
Adorno long ago pointed out in Zur Bekämpfung des Antisemitismus heute (Fighting Antisemitism Today [1962]), Zionists have a bad habit of picturing themselves as ‘little lambs and ‘golden boys’. They are reluctant to admit that Jewish people together have ‘a great, turbulent and wild history containing just as many horrors as the histories of other peoples.’
Zionist haughtiness is a badge of entitlement.
Not only do those hunting for revenge feel special. Since avengers are persecutors who act as if they are the persecuted, harsh punishment of those singled out as responsible for their past sufferings and current injuries is mandatory. Remember that the verb for vengeance is not ‘to venge’ but ‘to re-venge’.
Avengers don’t care if an eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind, or if others are unjustly ruined. Punishment is their thing. It can be modest, for instance unfairly crushing an opponent through targeted lawfare.
Revenge can be served cold. But in the ‘hot’ extreme, it can extend to the kinds of bestiality and reign of terror and torment deployed by the IDF in Gaza and the West Bank, where retribution is just as cruel as the original injuries that the avengers and their forebears once suffered.
Those seeking revenge against their own victimisation are creatures of malice. They indulge what psychoanalysts call splitting. Their opponents are enemies whose pursuit, humiliation and outright erasure absolve the avengers from any second thoughts, paranoia, guilt or shame they may be experiencing.
Revenge does more than help pull together the threads of their own lives into meaningful stories they regard as the Truth. The American writer Edgar Allan Poe described in his famous story ‘The Cask of Amontillado’ (1846) how avengers get pleasure from imprisoning their victims in their own revengeful obsessions.
For this purpose, they use every trick in the book, including dirty media tactics, telling lots of lies, and hurling aggrandised and often unwarranted claims that their opponents are ‘antisemitic’, or supporters of ‘terrorism’, or hellbent on ‘destroying Israel’.
The tactics illustrate how avengers often live in a fantasy world in which their own feelings of hurt, insult, anger and fear can only be remedied by dragging their victims through courtroom interrogations which grind them down and convict them of crimes they often didn’t commit.
Avengers act masochistically – Zionists usually allege that they’ve suffered such things as emotional distress, financial loss and reputational damage –
but sadism is their secret true friend.
The point of revenge is to do more than restore a damaged and fragile sense of meaning and purpose by making known to others the past injuries they or their forebears have suffered. Their revenge is malignant. They want to trap their victims within their own angry and self-righteous lust for retribution, to expose them publicly as worthless, to prove in media reports and court proceedings that their fate hangs utterly on their own quest for vengeful triumph.
Their revenge is profoundly anti-democratic. Arrogance redeemed by the victimisation of others is their thing. During the past two years, I’ve been asking myself whether the lawfare warriors will soon burn themselves out? Will they finally, if reluctantly, come to their senses by admitting that October 7th is not the second Shoah and that the state of Israel is guilty of unspeakable crimes?
Might they even be willing to swap their feelings of revenge for more life-affirming and socially useful mitzvahs, as figures like Hannah Arendt, Daniel Barenboim, Bob Dylan, Primo Levi and millions of other diaspora Jews did after the Shoah and are today still doing in many different global settings?
I’m not sure. But if I’m right about the deep psychodynamics at work among Zionist defenders of the state of Israel, there’s a fat chance of this happening.
Their lust for revenge is insatiable.
Their malice can’t be cured by public argument and public reason. They’re not interested in fairness, forgiveness or changing their minds. And so comes the parting question: with the help of competent and committed lawyers, can the field of law hereon everywhere be used to defeat Zionist lawfare warriors by proving that public criticism of theunfinished Israeli genocide is NOT equivalent to support for ‘terrorism’ or the abominable hatred of Jews?
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