Hostage Taking

The greatest, and no doubt most thankless, service the Israelis could provide for humanity in responding to the Hamas massacres would be to set a precedent for abolishing the politics of hostage taking. This would mean refusing both to be morally blackmailed by harm its policies do to Gazan civilians and to waver in their refusal to cease operations so as to negotiate for their own hostages. As I write this it is the second day since the Israeli government has shut of all amenities to Gaza. The predictable cries of “genocide” were issued immediately. No—it’s a siege, an ancient military practice. You end it by surrendering, which Hamas is free to do at any time. Those attacking Israel for starving, etc., Gazans don’t mention that. I wonder, perhaps naively, why, if Gaza can be kept under such a tight quarantine, the IDF even needs to enter Gaza—don’t the Gazans need to come out, with their hands up, unarmed? Why not conquer enough of the strip to set up a refugee camp welcoming those Gazans who wish to repudiate and leave Hamas-ruled Gaza—the Israelis need only ensure that no known or likely Hamas members be leaving and, of course, that everyone enter the protected space unarmed. If Hamas refuses to let them leave will that also be an Israeli war crime? Again, perhaps naïve—there may be reasons against doing this I haven’t considered. (Maybe the logistics are just too daunting.)

Just a moment, though. The fact that no one has “called upon” Hamas to surrender, or “demanded” that they do so, nor invoked any of the whole range of outraged human rights commonplaces that apply to those who won’t do anything to you or aren’t the tail you need to wag some dog, is a highly significant one. That in all likelihood no one has even considered this possibility exposes the moral fraudulence at the heart of just about all of the moral systems at play here.

But the broader issue is that of the politics of hostage taking, which is really constitutive of the politics of representation, i.e., modern democratic politics, more generally. Threatening to harm members of other groups, however defined, or finding patrons among other groups who will claim that mistreatment (however defined) of your group (however defined) is in effect a way of taking the social order hostage is the general form of representative politics. “Progress” in such things as civil rights takes place when publicized and carefully framed offenses against a particular group is taken to require new social rules protecting that group against that kind of offense. In that case, the only way to talk about politics is to make the most plausible complaints and accusations to the effect that you have suffered such offenses—how plausible they need to be varies greatly. This is the case even for the universal, non-group related rights, upon which the more narrowly focused civil rights are parasitic. The right to free speech means that someone who is prevented from speaking, or punished for speaking, can be held up as a victim (hostage) who substitutes for all of us—the state is the ultimate hostage-taker, and hostages must be taken to counter the state in the form of breaches of the peace.

Such practices of hostage taking devolve into ritualistic role playing but that’s never all it is—hostage taking is, of course, the dominant form of the regulation of violence in pre-state communities governed by honor codes. In communities governed by the law of the vendetta each member of every group is a potential hostage held by other groups. If a member of your group commits an offense against a member of another group, the conflict reducing mechanism is either to turn over that member, or, perhaps, a member equivalent to the one who suffered the offense, or to exact punishment yourself. This means, of course, that each group needs to police its own members very carefully, so as not to be drawn inadvertently into some larger conflict. The much abhorred practice of “honor killing” fits perfectly into this logic, insofar as each member of the group can disgrace the patriarch by exposing his inability to control his own tribe. Even if a woman is raped, such impotence is exposed, and the only way of erasing the shame is by killing its signifier—anyway, the fact that the woman in question was outside of the male supervision of members of her family long enough for such an act to be perpetrated is a marker of complicity.

This mode of self-policing communities lasts long into the democratic era—in the US, one will see it, for example, in the immigrant groups coming in large numbers around the turn of the 20^th century—it is the other side of ethnic solidarity: the group protects you but you must undertake not to shame the group. This is a much weaker version of the honor system, of course, relying mostly upon public shaming and ostracism rather than violence. It no doubt weakens as individuals become capable of entering the larger society and no longer depend upon the protection of the group or, for that matter, want to be associated with such “primitive” practices (which includes such things as approval of mate selection). The hostage taking system then gets transferred to the interactions between citizens and states, predicated upon the logic of one member of the group standing in for the entire group (which is what’s going on when we speak of such things as “racism”). On one level, it is the continuum between central banking and the intelligence services (ultimately on an international scale) that determines the rotation in power governing representational systems, but the idiom of such controlled revolutions is that of the taking, redemption and commemoration of hostages. To single out practices whereby one member is made to suffer for the putative crimes of his group is to organize the legal and political system around the punishing of such practices. This can be seen as the means by which the monarch breaks up the tribal or feudal order—by claiming the prerogative to judge individuals over and beyond the role they play as tokens in inter and intra-group circulation. Once the king is replaced by the rotation of occupants of the center, competition over which groups deserve to have that prerogative exercised on their behalf becomes the default mode of governance. This is the case for groups you like as much as for groups you don’t like. This, of course, leads to “discrimination” against the least “marked” groups, because it’s much harder in such cases to claim that a member has been treated as a substitute for the group.

The honor system never changed all that much in international politics, where there are hegemonic powers but no Leviathan capable of judging all cases—countries must address each other on the field of honor. A government must be ready to, if it has the power, wreak destruction on another country that has mistreated one of its citizens. And it is very much a question of power—a weak government can allow offenses to pass because it has no choice—it is precisely the stronger country that is bound to ensure offenses against it do not pass with impunity. If countries are capable of allowing international institutions to mediate their disputes then the honor system recedes, but that just means that a pale equivalent of the Leviathan, good enough for secondary matters, has been created by some conglomeration of reciprocally well-disposed powers; as soon as real competition between powers recommences, we are back to the honor system. Britain’s reason for entering both World Wars were promises it granted to protect other nations. China cannot allow the US to traverse waters it has claimed as its own without enduring humiliation, even if broader global ambitions make it possible to exercise self-restraint in how remedy for such humiliations is sought. The process of decolonialization was saturated with the language of honor and hostage-taking—the whole anticolonial discourse of figures like Aime Cesaire and Frantz Fanon was predicated upon the new nations restoring their honor, in large part by showing their ability to take hostages from the colonizers with impunity. And, no doubt, a great deal of postcolonial White Guilt is an acceptance of that logic of exchange—they must take enough hostages from us to even out all the hostages we took from them over the centuries.

My reference to the self-restraint countries might exercise in exacting revenge or recompense for humiliation points to the need for larger systems if the honor system is to be replaced. Of course, one might argue that it cannot and need not be replaced but, rather, restored to its previous condition, in which honor belongs to those capable of defending it. But that system would really make it impossible to avoid world wars, which we can no longer afford—indeed, much of the dysfunction and even crazed efforts at globalization over the past few decades, under such pretexts as “climate change,” are, if generously understood, based on a shared sense that not only must restraints on competition between great powers be restrained but that we can’t just say that and must therefore have pretexts for imposing restraints—simply establishing restraints on straightforward mimetic terms would incite rather quell rivalry. So, we need and will have, one way or another, global ordering systems, and events drawing global attention must be treated as ways of shaping those emergent systems. Israel, whose existence is ambivalent in ways that no other country can match, is both a dangerous and propitious place to begin thinking about such transitions. The position that Israel simply shouldn’t exist has, for very large numbers across the world, never been relaxed since it came into existence. The same, of course, is true for Jews who, according to some (again, never completely abandoned) variants of Christianity, also simply shouldn’t exist. In such a case, one’s existence always comes with a bit of a scandal attached—the fact that one continues to exist when one shouldn’t is itself a sign of one’s extensive control over all the mechanisms requisite for ensuring one’s anomalous existence, whereby one has stained with complicity all those who accept one’s existence as default. And, of course, we see the exact opposite position, proclaiming the absolute necessity of Israel’s existence (the same argument has been applied to Jews more generally), for humanity, civilization, democracy, or whatever. Zionism succeeded in creating the Jewish state while completely failing in normalizing Jewish existence. 

All hostage-taking discourses and the accusations that constitute them all go through Israel—Israel as hostage and Israel as hostage taker are inseparable from discussions of Israel. This “status” seems far more of a threat to global ordering practices than it was, and it serves, as far as I can see, no benefit. Even my opening to this post, though, implicitly posits a kind of Israeli “exceptionalism”—it is Israel, I began by announcing, that is positioned so as to usher us into a new, post-hostage-taking era. Do I contradict myself, etc.? Others will come along and do it better than Israel who is sure to, regardless of the overall success of the mission it’s undertaken, to botch a great deal of it. The fact that Israel is in this situation is a result of a lot of botching, probably to degrees greater than anyone is thinking right now (and there is already a lot of thinking about it). But let’s put the Palestinians at the center for a moment—Palestinian politics is a global politics in which all the hostage-taking “tropes” of the progressive decolonizing world order have come to concentrate. Palestinians are the global sacrificial object that has replaced the Jews of the post-war world. Palestinian “resistance” is by no means autonomously generated—it is maintained by international funding and fan bases without which the Palestinians by now would have simply been integrated into the Israeli state or formed another impoverished and corrupt Third World dump ignored by everyone. Or let’s be generous and point to the extraordinary seaport Gaza might become—either way, it comes to the same thing, that the Palestinians would be something familiar.

If the Israelis manage to, in Barack Obama’s words, “dismantle” Hamas, that will be a remarkable accomplishment, in both practical and symbolic terms. It will show that “support” for an entity whose sole legitimacy derives from its opposition to some other entity does not guarantee the perpetuity of that entity’s existence. Hostage-taking in global politics will be dealt a blow. If the Israelis manage it, how they will do so will measure the extent of the accomplishment—optimally, Hamas will be replaced by a better form of government not grounded in antagonism to Israel. I leave out of consideration here Iran and the Saudis, the US and the Russians—accounting for the specific geopolitical consequences would be another kind of discussion. But I am assuming that those considerations will be better considered if the specter of hostage-taken were to begin to lifted from global idioms, leaving us to talk in, on the one hand more traditional terms of responsibility for governing the territories one has proven capable of governing and, on the other hand, more forward looking  terms in which game-changing exchanges can register and remedy the historical resentments that international “realism” never could. It remains the case that Israel’s future is tied to that of the Palestinians, or the Arabs and others in lands it controls. The extreme savagery of the Hamas attacks might be taken to result from “pent-up” frustration at being locked up in an “open-air prison” all these years; I think it much more reflects a Muslim sense of humiliation at being defeated and ruled by Jews, and a re-assertion of (one version of) traditional Islamic privileges regarding the defeated Jew. Either way there are certainly “issues” to be dealt with here, well beyond the bromides of the (obviously defunct) two-state solution. Israel still has the primary responsibility for addressing such issues, which also means it has to claim the prerogative to do so. Here I’ll end, since getting more specific here would mean entering a discussion of ongoing reorganizations within Israel, and ways those processes would have to be made more deliberate. But I’ll end with this: any solution to any problem involves a more precise allocation of responsibility in accord with power, and power in accord with responsibility. An end to hostage-taking would be an end to opining without being able to initiate a discussion of who, exactly, should do what, and how. And, in this case, all the very concerned parties could use all the means at their disposal to pressure Hamas to surrender and save their own people from the “genocidal” Israelis? Everyone must want that, right? And wouldn’t this be the shortest and even most just way? Wouldn’t Israel, in leaving only that option open, be practicing a kind of hostage taking to transcend hostage taking?