Somehow I find it difficult, in general, to get excited about something along with everybody else. And to my sorrow, that also includes the general commotion over the death in a plane crash of Asaf Ramon, the son of Ilan Ramon [an Israeli astronaut who died in the crash of the space shuttle Columbia in 2003 – trans]. To be sure, it is sad when young people die. But how did we get to a state of affairs in which the only thing that unites us as a society is death, and nothing else? Rabin is killed – yallah, the entire nation is united for a moment. Two homosexuals are killed in a club on Nahmani street – yallah, everyone flocks to the vigil. And those are only two examples that I can recall at the moment.
Why is this? Because, in my opinion, Israeli society has undergone a far-reaching process of cultural primitivization, such that it is no longer aware of how much it has lost touch with its core values and how much it has become based on cheap sentiment.
When I was a child, our servant, Mazal, would enter the house and immediately relate all the recent latest tragedies that had occurred in her family and in her neighbourhood. All the illnesses, the deaths, the miseries. And my grandmother would conclude – in French, so that the servant would not understand – “that’s how it is with the simple folk, they love to go to funerals because they don’t have money to go to the theatre.”
This emotive preoccupation with death and disasters, then, which contains an element of pornographic perversion, was to be perceived by any cultured person as something clearly unworthy. But of course exaggerated eruptions of emotion have today gone mainstream, and not only mainstream; but the Prime Minister himself encourages it, followed by his Minister of Education.
The supposed justification is that we are confronted with a symbolic story of sacrifice for the State, as pilots are perceived in the collective Israeli fantasy as people who sacrifice themselves utterly for the collectivity, without any thought of personal benefit or gratification from the fact that the IDF trains them to be pilots; and generally speaking, there is something exalted, nearly angelic or divine in the about the image of the pilot, maybe because he has wings and flies through the heavens.
But for a moment, let us recall, for example, Dan Halutz – the former Chief-of-Staff who was among those responsible for one of the biggest fiascos in Israeli military history, called the Second Lebanon War. Dan Halutz was a pilot. But as a man, he was definitely not someone I would describe as resembling an angel or a divinity or a figure worthy of emulation. He is the one who uttered the infamous sentence expressing sheer indifference at the deaths of people caused by a bomb dropped from his plane.*
Dan Halutz is not the only one who thinks that pilots should be detached from normal human misgivings. In Operation Cast Lead in Gaza there were pilots who flew warplanes that dropped bombs indiscriminately, and there are those who say that they dropped phosphorus bombs, which are banned by international conventions. I did not hear about a single pilot refusing to set out on a mission or expressing regret after the fact. All this by way of saying that it is very convenient to think that our military pilots are in training to save us from Iran; but in the meantime they are in fact doing some very dirty work, in which I see no grounds for admiration.
That myth – that pilots are people who transcend good and evil, that they are something between acrobats and volunteers for suicide missions, that the accepted laws of morality do not apply to them, has roots in some very unpleasant places. It is true that the model of the pilot as one who is always humane and courageous derives its inspiration from the French pilot Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the author of The Little Prince. But there are also other models, which we tend to play down. Those models are the pilots of Nazi Germany, who were admired even by their enemies, like the Nazi combat fighter pilot Willy Schludecker, who was killed a year ago in a plane crash at age 88 (!) over the skies of Britain, which he had bombed during the Second World War. Or Wilhelm Batz, another lauded pilot, who was responsible for the deaths of thousands and the destruction of entire cities, but never mind all that – as a pilot he enjoys moral immunity and to this day his image remains an object of admiration among all who take an interest in the history of aerial warfare.
I wish one day Netanyahu, instead of saving his excitement only for various kinds of death, would deliver a speech about how excited he was by a book he had read, or a film that he had seen, or something positive that he had witnessed with the same fervour that he exhibits over the latest tragic death. But – what country do we live in, after all? Netanyahu is a rubber duck that floats towards whichever end of the bathtub the people push it. And the people want and love melodramas.
Again, my intention is not to play down the sadness that must be felt over the death of the son of Ilan Ramon. What I am trying to do is to distinguish between the sad event itself and the big production that has been created around it, which, as is obvious to all, serves the interests of the politicians, for whom the more sorrow expressed, the better. It also renders a service to the masses, in that it offers them free entertainment – mournful entertainment, which is the best kind.
The only thing that this affected mourning does not enhance is the cultural level of this country, which every day is coming more and more to resemble a freakish bunch of mourners who frantically cling to death, any death at all, in order to perpetuate the only thing that can still unify this people, which is the sense of loss.
And why does this sense of loss exercise such power? Because it is built on the idea that it makes no difference what we do, everything will always turn out badly, everything is shit. And if you think about it, the idea that everything is shit can be very comforting, because contained within it is inexhaustible supply of self-pity and a kind of authorization from above to keep gazing at our navels and to nurture the idea that if that is what happened to the son of Ilan Ramon, then the rest of us are collectively very, very wretched indeed.
* Asked by a journalist in August 2002 how he felt when he dropped a bomb from his plane, he replied, “I feel a slight jolt in the wing”. Halutz was the commander of the Israel Air Force at the time, and a few days previously, an IAF plane had dropped a one ton bomb on an apartment building in Gaza, killing several children and other civilians along with Hamas commander Salah Shehadeh – trans.
Translated from Hebrew by George Malent
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