zionism: an audacity-producing machine

from the banality of evil to the audacity of evil; how to use zionist logic against itself

It’s been a few long decades since Hanna Arendt wrote:

“For when I speak of the banality of evil, I do so only on the strictly factual level, pointing to a phenomenon which stared one in the face at the trial. Eichmann was not Iago and not Macbeth, and nothing would have been farther from his mind than to determine with Richard III to prove a villain.' Except for an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement, he had no motives at all… He merely, to put the matter colloquially, never realized what he was doing… It was sheer thoughtlessness—something by no means identical with stupidity—that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of that period. And if this is 'banal' and even funny, if with the best will in the world one cannot extract any diabolical or demonic profundity from Eichmann, this is still far from calling it commonplace… That such remoteness from reality and such thoughtlessness can wreak more havoc than all the evil instincts taken together, which, perhaps, are inherent in man—that was, in fact, the lesson one could learn in Jerusalem.”

I’m sure you can find many commonalities between her description and analysis of the Nazis and today’s Zionists, the thougtlesness, the blind self-intrest and remotness. But there’s also something quite different and singular about zionism that I think is important to articulate if we want to understand it and uproot it from our social possibilities and futures.

I think that a great point of departure can be the central question in trying to understand systems of power as they interact with and form social groups, if we want to understand fascism more deeply, and why it keeps reappearing as a seemingly inevitable horizon of the state.

This question is well articulated by Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus:

“The fundamental problem of political philosophy is still precisely the one that Spinoza saw so clearly: Why do men fight for their servitude as stubbornly as though it were their salvation?”

It’s common to refer to zionism, nzism, racism, and other forms of bigotry as an “ideology,” and the people stuck in their grasp as “brainwashed.” And although propaganda or manufacturing consent through education and media is part of the process, it is about a lot more than that; it is indeed about—a process.

Making political, social, and economic discourse a matter of “ideology” is precisely what renders the capacity of caring about oppression and suffering a matter of “opinion.” When in reality, there’s either being aware of and actively learning about how the world around us and its systems function, and caring about our role in it and about others’ suffering, or there’s being willingly dumb, numb, and blind to it.

Being for genocide and occupation is not an opinion; it’s an ignorant, narcissistic, and bigoted stance.

In a very Deleuzian fashion, we can say that Zionism is not an ideology; it is a social machine, and not as a metaphor but a literal machine that produces, that keeps creating logics, premises, and material realities. It is not enough to answer our question by simply stating that Israelis are brainwashed into zionist “ideology,” that would be a massive oversimplification of the entire process that is zionism and will only serve to satiate our need to “other” and separate ourselves from it as a “unique” form of evil.

When Arendt spoke of the banality of evil, she warned us about this posture exactly. She aims to show us how it is not that nazis were uniqly monstrous and evil in some special way but that it is the very human potential and capacity to focus on the mundain, self-intrest that makes going along with such evil possible.

In other words, nazism was not some evil ideology but a productive social machine, a process that is made of infinite other machines and processes, molar and molecular, social and personal, political, economic and historical, all working and producing together that made such horrific realities possible.

One of the products of this machine is social banality. A banal that was already a flux, a potential in the group, that was amplified and reproduced at scale by the social machine.

This is not only why referring to “ideology” and “propaganda” is missing and reducing the process, our understanding of it and therfore our ability to imagine other futures, but also why i equating zionism with nazism, although u very understandable sentiment, is grossly inadaquate.

There are many similarites and paralels between the nazi social machine and that of zionism, like the utter normalization of dehumanzing palestinian or the brutality of its genocidal passions, and it is certainly safe to say that the latter is an evolution of the former; but they are also very different processes.

When we understand these historical events not as local accidents but as ongoing processes, we see that the forces of fascism have gone through an evolution since the 30s and new operations and qualities have been added to its current versions.

We can’t separate everyhitng that happened collectivaly since nazi germany (and every gencoide before and after) from everything else that happened since, namely but not limited to; US imperialism, economic colonialism, the rigidificaiton of nationalism and the nation state, economic booms and reccessions, the politics of fossil fuels as well as more molecular process that have develop within persons in society, all come together to make for how zionis passions are playing out in front of us in genocidal ferver.

All such machinic processes are inseparable from the formation of Israel as we know it from every child murdered in Gaza, every new settlement built on stolen land, exhausting conversations you’ve ever had with a zionist, and most importantly, from each of our own lived experiences.

We are the process.

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We now see qualities and expressions of the zionist social machine that we haven’t seen in previous fascist genocidal regimes, at least not in this way.

One such quality is what I like to call the audacity of evil.

It’s how zionism produces an extravagant, clearly contradictory display of pure evil. To broadcast a brutal genocide publicly, loudly, and proudly, while at the very same time, gaslight everyone watching it unfond and maintain eternal victimhood.

It’s how Israel bombed dozens of hospitals in Gaza with patients in them, we all saw children’s bodies burned in their hospital beds, while at the same time, a completely empty hospital in Tel Aviv is slightly damaged by a likely misguided Iranian missile, and it’s suddenly a horrific war crime.

It’s how, for more than 20 months, Israeli soldiers have proudly documented their war crimes and posted them to social media and their dating app profiles, how we all heard hundreds and thousands of Israelis saying to the world they want to see every man, woman, and child in Gaza dead and at the while having the audacity to maintain it’s the most moral army in the world and anyone who dares to suggest otherwise is just hating jews.

Of course, as Israel is merely an American colonial outpost, this audacity is not only characteristic of Zionism but of the entire imperial machine. It’s how democrats pretend to care about humanist, universalist values while working hand in hand to finance a genocide in Gaza, or how, under Trump, every form of hate, racism, domination, and capital stupidity that democrats expressed with politeness is now broadcast shamelessly. It’s a US administration cutting social security, education and goverment oversight while launching a presidential crypto shitcoin.

It’s ICE agents deporting indigenous people as “illegal immigrants” while being the thieves of this very land themselves.

It’s how a TV anchor in the US has the gall to suggest that Iranian women should want to be bombed so Iranian women can finally have access to better education, while the literacy rate in Iran among women is 96% compared to only about 76% in the US, and as if the oppression of Iranian women justifies bombing its people.

It’s the sheer audacity of it all that I think is qualitatively unique and needs exploring, even nazis did their best to hide their crimes, now there’s no need anymore. It’s all out there for us to see, and still, somehow, hidden behind walls of indifference, racism, and Western supremacy.

The greater the contradictions, the greater the audacity. Not only in the molar expression of how the group reacts as a whole, but also in the molecular workings of each person, each singularity in the socios. It’s how each and every Israeli manages to live with the inherent contradictory, paradoxical cognitive dissonance that is zionism and keep choosing their own oppression while feeling eternally superior and eternally victimized by the world, regardless of reason or objective reality.

An audacity-producing machine.

The machine produces audacity because nothing Real can sustain its own logic, because nothing in it makes sense anymore, not historically, not politically, not ecologically, not economically, not morally or ethically. Nothing. It has to produce enough facade or sheer power, not just brute military force, but performative gust to mask its own inherent fragility.

Aside from the obvious importance of naming and making sense of the systems of power we want to deconstruct, this term could serve as a social strategy in fighting this unique form of fascism, colonialism, and racial capitalism that is zionism.

By exposing it, naming it, and shaming it, by turning it against itself, we might turn this audacity weaponized against our sensibilities, morality, and beating hearts into a tool in our antifascist toolbox.

We can be audacious in our own Desire for collective liberation, for our revolutionary decolonial passions, after all, the audacity of the zionist machine has one goal in mind, and that is to serve as a confusing smoke screen that maintains a status quo of oppression by demanding we acknoledge and work from within its premises and logics.

But this crack in what seems realistic, this audacity also creates and allows for something quite revolutionary to emerge. Allows for a departure and displacement of what is considered reasonable, releases collective libidinal forces from the bondage of what hegemony deems possible, and allows us to imagine the impossible, the unreasonable, the unrealistic.

Next time that someone tells you that “land back” is unrealistic, that there’s no way we will live in a world without nation states, ot that capitalism is natural because “humans are inherently evil and greedy,” remember the audacity producing machine,

And have some audacity.