The Politics of Political Despair

Prof. David Ohana teaches European History, Zionism, Israeli Identity and Mediterranean Culture at Ben Gurion University of the Negev and is a senior researcher at the Ben Gurion Research Institute at Sede Boker. He was the founder and the first Academic Director of the Forum for Mediterranean Cultures at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute.

His books include: The Order of the Nihilists (Jerusalem, 1993), A Humanist in the Sun: Camus and the Mediterranean Inspiration (Jerusalem, 2000), The Promethean Passion (Jerusalem, 2000), The Rage of the Intellectuals (Jerusalem, 2003) and Neither Canaanites, Nor Crusaders: The Origin of Israeli Mythology (Jerusalem, 2008). The works he has edited are: The Shaping of Israeli Identity (London, 1995), Albert Camus: Parcours Méditerraneéns (Jerusalem, 1998), Lire Albert Memmi: Déracinemen, Exil, Identité (Paris/Genève/Bruxelles: Factuel, 2002), Between Two Worlds by Jacqueline Kahanoff (Jerusalem, 2005). Prof. Ohana has also edited the Israeli Reader Books Series by Rousseau, Camus, Memmi and others.

In 2009, his trilogy, The Nihilist Order will be published by Sussex Academic Press and his book, Political Theologies in the Holy Land – Israeli Messianism and its Critics, by Routledge.

Escape from the political has many faces. Since Aristotle's and Plato's virtue (or the general good) via Rousseau's general will to Habermas' public sphere, politics has always been directed to the whole society - to the universal and not to the particular, to the objective and not to the subjective, to the general and not to the private.
During the last generation in Israel, we have witnessed a phenomenon that can be defined as the "politics of political despair". The "pathology of cultural criticism", to use the expression of the historian, Fritz Stern, has many variants, but the common denominator is the despair in the universal, objective and general sphere in politics.    
The privatization and the sectoralization of Israeli society in the last generation have several disturbing manifestations. With the unraveling of the Zionist Ideology and the weakening of the social solidarity ethos, each group is concerned only with its own private wound.

On the radical right, the politics of political despair has been manifested by the murderous act of Baruch Goldstein, the massacre of the Palestinians in Hebron, and the assassination of Prime Minister Rabin by Yigal Amir. This phenomenon lies beyond conceptual categories such as "radical right", "political theology", "fundamentalism" and "political Messianism". The contempt of the radical right for the political establishment, the democratic rules, the decadent secular culture and the hedonistic capitalist society reveals a total alienation from contemporary Israeli society. They recall the Bader-Meinhof group in Germany or the Red Brigades in Italy in the 1970s. The "hilltop" youth in the occupied territories and the demonstrations that were held after the disengagement plan in the summer of 2005 were other variants, which are discussed in this paper. I also deal with the anarchist group, the young demonstrators against the construction of the separation fence in the occupied territories.

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