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FRA defaced hostage poster in London (Leon Neal/Getty Images)
Of the images I have not been able to clear from my mind over these past 12 terrible months the most tenacious is that of two young women: one in an elegant hijab, one not, laughing for the camera as they deface a poster of a hostage.
Laughing for the camera. An unintentionally pointed preposition. I think I meant only to say at, but what if it was performative, either in response to a cameraman urging the women to vandalise a photograph of an unknown and possibly already slaughtered Jew, or an act of bravado on the women’s own parts? You never know for sure what you are looking at on film or how it came to be there. But the brief scene was unforgettably hateful in its callous insolence, however one interprets it. Scrawling with a marker — a marker bought for the occasion? — over the face of someone you don’t know. Someone in desperate trouble. A small act of terror in itself, I thought. And then, in tearing it off the wall, as though to say “may you never be found’, a smiling act of collusion in the abduction, the disappearance and, perhaps ultimately, the murder. A message to the family who invested hope in that poster: may you be eternally disappointed!
I have wondered — sitting this past year in the cowardly sanctuary of my London apartment, listening to the warlike whirr of the helicopters and the scarcely less warlike yells of the weekly peace protest — whether the women have ever seen that footage of themselves. And, whether they have or they haven’t, if they’ve regretted it. They did what they did very soon after the massacre, while the smell of blood and rumour lingered still in the air, when every charge was met by denial, and it was all too easy to read events according to the rigidities of one’s politics. Even the evidence of our eyes became handmaidens to falsehood. Rape? What rape? Rape didn’t suit the prepossessions of the hour. But is it not possible, now that time has passed and certainties have been shaken, that the women recall what they did with shame and maybe even reproach each other with it? “It was your idea.” “No it was yours.”
What if — while we are wondering — they wondered, when they saw pictures of released hostages, whether one of them was their hostage? Would that have made them feel better? Or what if, when they saw pictures of murdered hostages, they wondered if one of those was theirs? Would that have pierced their carapace of mirth? Or was the original defacement an expression of inexpugnable loathing?
Which brings us back to what is for me the greatest mystery of all: how the slaughter and, in some cases, dismemberment of innocent Israelis, men, women and children can have delighted educated people around the world to the point where there was no further violence against them — not even genocide “in context” if we read Harvard’s President correctly — that they couldn’t countenance with joy?
Yes, it was hysteria and many of the more publicly hysterical have since rowed back a little on their frenzy. But why, at any stage of the massacre, was there irrationality on this scale? We were back in the Middle Ages, some said, when the Jew was in league with the devil and hatred of him was unquestioned and contagious. But wasn’t that hatred begat from ignorance? Can we regress half a millennium just like that? And if we can, what value the education we prize so highly?
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SubscribeThe author seems to think that “the education” which we receive, whose twofold general aim is to prepare the young for their lives as adults whilst transmitting the cultural norms and values of their particular society is sufficient to overcome the very basic elements which exist within all of us when backed against a wall or part of a mob. Our prehistoric striving to simply survive has been superseded only in relatively recent millennia; formal and universal education only for a matter of about 150 years (in the UK) which is nowhere near enough to change the basic instincts of human nature, even if education as such could do so in the first place.
In the context of this article, i think it’s possible to understand what he’s getting at but choosing the particular example of one instance of inhumane behaviour doesn’t really cut through the vehemence of the antisemitic protests over the past 12 months. His previous articles have similarly lacked the cut-throughs and insights that would further understanding of the predicament of Israel. His reputation as a novelist and writer isn’t being enhanced via Unherd.
Apart from it not being one instance the amount of anti-Semitic behaviour we’ve seen in the last year, a very short twelve months, is enough to wonder at how quickly we’ve slid backwards into darker views.
Bravo, Howard. Brilliant, as always.
Mr. Jacobson has written a piece which is: erudite, interesting, generous and peaceable. I suspect though, that the young women and their allies would see it as: flabby, wishy-washy and lacking in conviction and self-confidence.
Hmm. They probably didn’t think much about the deep meanings then or now.
It would not be until either of them physically face the horror, that they no longer find funny such savage potential within humanity.
From what I remember of those clips of people removing or defacing posters of kidnapped hostages most of them were girls, and I say girls and not women. Girls around that age down through school are capable of attacking anothers self esteem or weakness with real cruelty, without seemingly been aware of the pure destruction involved. Most women will confirm seeing this in their school years. It’s a viciousness without real purpose, like someone pulling of the legs of an insect. Of course they’re useful idiots for the radicals and they’re large in numbers at protests, but they’re there for reasons nothing to do with Palestine and when interviewed have nothing to say, knowing nothing about the whole business. How to define this behaviour? I don’t know except to say it’s blind, unadulterated viciousness. I imagine those girls will just bury any guilt they feel and move on, unconcerned about what they did.
Boring boring. Taking once incident as an amalgam to paint a very one sided picture. Lazy journalism.
From memory it was not one incident.