Notes on Argentina, Hamas, Mass Killings and Disappearances

1.

Argentina had its second and final presidential election debate last night. The organizers proposed a minute’s silence to be held in memory of the victims of the Hamas attacks in southern Israel. All but Myriam Bregman, the candidate of the  Workers Party, agreed. In the debate itself she said that while she was pained by the civilian casualties they

… occur in a conflict that is rooted in the State of Israel's policy of occupation and apartheid against the Palestinian people.

And offered not a word of criticism of Hamas.

I suggest three intertwined explanations of this stance. The background one is Argentina’s historic monolingual and monocultural approach to integrating immigrants. From about 1880, compulsory lay primary education, and military service for males, turned the children of Sicilians, Gallegos, Calabreses, Basques, Catalans, east European Jews, Levantine Jews, Muslims, Irish, Germans and dozens of other nationalities and identities into Argentines, in most cases monolingual ones. Though there’s no longer compulsory military service and the nation-building effort is not as intense its effects can still be felt today: whatever their family history one rarely meets an Argentine who isn’t intensely proud of being one.  It’s not common to meet people who describe themselves as, say, Irish Argentine; you’re Argentine, that’s it. In the same way, secular Jewish Argentines generally put their national identity very much first and this is especially true of those sympathetic to the left and/or peronism. If pushed they’ll say something like “I’m Argentine with Jewish origins”. So, for Bregman, there’s probably no moral or emotional cost to identifying with the slaughterers of fellow Jews.

The next point is a bit more speculative but I’m sure it’s true and it’s reasonable to make it in the context of Argentina where psychoanalytical thinking is thick in the air.

Bregman’s identification with Hamas is a sign of internalized oppression, the product of millennia of genocidal persecution, a subconscious yearning to be identified as a good Jew, not one of those dirty Jews deserving to be murdered.

Connected with this there are the psychological rewards one may then receive from fellow leftists and peronistas who will praise you as a good and true Argentine. If you are a Jewish writer or intellectual and say you are anti-Zionist and repeat some of the slogans of Palestinian nationalism you identify yourself with what David Hirsh calls the Camp of the Good. And who wouldn’t want to be a member of that?              

The final point is the most obvious. Bregman is Jewish and colloquially referred to as “La Rusa” i.e. the Jew, and also a leading member of a tightly disciplined political party. As such she’s under particular pressure to toe its line on the Israel-Palestine conflict with especial enthusiasm. And she did.

2.

I can’t stop thinking about the massacre of (at least) 260 young Jews attending a music festival in the desert.

When we think of the Holocaust, we see gas chambers and crematoria. But they came later. The Holocaust started with groups of Jews being shot in the open air by executioners who volunteered for that task and had no other. The only relevant difference I can think of between the two is that while the Nazis tried to cover up their atrocities and after the war the surviving ones generally denied responsibility for them, or that they had even occurred, Hamas is proud of its “work” and has put great efforts into spreading images of it.

Another difference is the enthusiastic support for the massacre expressed by some Western intellectuals and academics. In the breasts of some left/progressive thinkers there beats a yearning for Jewish blood. They live safe lives far from the scenes of horror but feel a vicarious thrill at forming part of what they see as the army of liberation from Zionism, seen as the principal source of evil in the world.

It’s notable how the recent events in Nagorno-Karabakh, for example, or the civil war in Sudan, or the absorption of Western Sahara by Morocco don’t lead to a fraction of the excitement among the professors in Europe and North America who fancy themselves as leftists and defenders of human rights.

3.

Between 1976 and 1983 thousands of Argentines were dragged from their homes at gunpoint by masked men. In most cases their relatives were unable to find out what had happened to them and they were never seen again. The search for justice for those crimes has become an emblem of the fight for human rights throughout the world. Everyone has heard of the disappeared, their mothers and grandmothers.

It’s curious that the obvious if incomplete parallels between those crimes and those of the initial hours of the Hamas assault on Israel have not been remarked on.