Tel Aviv's message to Jenin: the blood demonstration

Jenin reads Israel more faithfully than the claims of Tel Aviv, just as Jenin now corrects the claims of Israeli humanity as every Palestinian martyr "corrects" them; The truth about Israel does not lie in its struggles, but rather in the supreme regulator of its conflicts: its colonial cohesion. And since the assimilation project of an invented people did not succeed in creating a unified society, the colonial function succeeded in that. But the strangeness vanishes when we put in the center the fact that we are in the process of an ideological colonial project, which does not distinguish between “perception” and the “state” - hence the fragility of the state - and that membership in the ideological project is dependent on hegemony, or on political agreement much more than it is on civil identity. Or statism, which explains the Israelis' fear of "collapse".

However, the weakness of the doctrinal project, i.e. its need for political agreement as an existential necessity that compensates for the fluidity of statism, is matched by colonial cohesion: the deep values ​​of colonial society.

In a study on the "lethal army", a concept that developed in the Hebrew state - on the heels of the American army - and was put forward by former IDF Chief of Staff Aviv Kochavi shortly after his appointment in January 2019, explaining that it would provide a "deadly, efficient and renewable army". The selection and dissemination of the term "lethal" as a result of its identification as an attractive element to all segments of Israeli society, as part of a strategy to recruit societal legitimacy for what the Israeli army is doing - and will do - later on.

The research indicates that the fluidity of the term allows the various Israeli sectors to interpret it according to their values ​​and positions, based on the fact that the choice of this term in particular depended on a "deep knowledge of the values ​​of the Israeli public." That is, the term "lethality" was chosen because of its ability to "produce mobilizing effects within Israeli groups of different ethnic, religious, and demographic backgrounds."

In short, the research indicates that the Israeli army relies in its increasing violence on legitimacy that addresses the deep values ​​- albeit different - of Israeli society with its liberal and right-wing groups, meaning that the success and legitimacy of the "lethal" AETOS did not depend on the power of the right, but rather on the term's ability to fathom the value denominator. the deepest depths of Israeli society in all its fissures.

On the other hand, the Israeli social sectors are similar in their need for violence. Some of them may be satisfied with the Hawara model, while others may be satisfied with the Jenin model. They will differ on the degree of the scene of lethality, which is more scenic: Hawara or Jenin. They may differ on that, and they will differ on the extent to which the existing institutions need to be disciplined by violence. This is currently the center of the dispute, but both of them need violence: the Palestinian pays with blood the price of Tel Aviv's civil requirements no less than he pays the price of the ideological aspirations of the outposts.

The "liberal" needs to manage a normal life, prosperity, deal-making and academic cooperation in the country's capitals for an inexpensive struggle, which requires the disappearance of the Palestinian resistance and its distance from the possibility of collecting any price from the colonizer, not less than what is needed by the settler who wants the expansion of random outposts. The Palestinian must refrain from resistance and presence so that Tel Aviv continues to feel the lightness of the occupation and its low Israeli price, in order to be “liberated” from it. Tel Aviv needs to be liberated from Jenin as part of the cost of its day, so it uproots it by force, and goes on with its demonstrations proudly.

However, pride has its sources that do not need backyards. Jenin knows them. We know that the right to liberty has no meaning without the right to strive for liberty. Let all talk of “participation” or a “common homeland” or recognition of a “bi-national” reality stop now, and let the authors of these discourses express their positions regarding the right to resistance.