‘Never has peace seemed so necessary and impossible’ — Eva Illouz on the horrors of Oct. 7 and its aftermath
In her work, the iconic Franco-Israeli sociologist strives to make the darkness visible
Legendary sociologist Eva Illouz Photo by James Startt
By Robert Zaretsky February 2, 2024
A cascade of commentaries has been unleashed by both the Hamas massacre of more than 1,200 men, women, and children in Israel last October, and the latter’s punishing military response, which continues unabated. Yet few of these commentaries I have read rival the same mixture of pungency and perceptiveness, sharp intelligence and deep emotion as those written by the Franco-Israeli academic and intellectual Eva Illouz.
Given the focus of Illouz’s research, this is not surprising. An iconoclastic and influential sociologist, Illouz has published several books on the play of our emotions in the realms of politics and economics. From her account of modern capitalism’s impact on our emotions — Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism — to the toxic impact of emotions like fear and resentment on our politics, most recently in her book The Emotional Life of Populism, Illouz traces how, in the words of the 18th century philosopher David Hume, our reason is all too often the slave of our passions.
Illouz divides her time between Israel, where she holds a chair at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and France, where she is a director of research at the prestigious École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. During a visit I made to Paris last December, I had arranged an interview with Illouz, but scheduling conflicts got in our way. Earlier this month, we instead exchanged several emails in which Illouz replied to a series of questions, which have been edited for length and clarity, on the soul-numbing churn of events in Israel and Gaza since Oct. 7.
You divide your personal and professional lives between France and Israel. You were in the former when Hamas militants struck the latter, killing more than 1,200 men, women and children, and taking as hostages more than 200 others. What did you first feel, then think when you learned about the massacre?
At first, I thought it was another skirmish between Hamas and Israel. I did not pay serious attention. One hour later, my youngest son — who is studying in Stanford — called me during the middle of his night to tell me that a friend from his Israeli WhatsApp group had reported her uncle and aunt had been murdered by Palestinians. Only then did it dawn on me that something big was happening. When the news, with images and videos, made clear the border had been effortlessly crossed, that a wide-scale massacre had taken place, that the army was nowhere to be seen, I felt something I never felt before in real life. I can only call it sheer, undiluted terror. The kind I feel — for fleeting seconds — only when I am watching a horror movie or having a terrible nightmare. The ground under my feet opened up. It was the idea of an enemy infiltrating the privacy of homes on a quiet holiday, the savage and gruesome butchery, the glee of the murderers, the powerlessness of a whole nation waiting in agony for the army to rescue the civilians. The event as it unfolded had the texture of a nightmare. The days which followed made the abyss deeper and darker.
More than 100 days have passed since the massacre. Everything has changed, ranging from the eruption of antisemitic sentiment across the globe to the disruption of geo-political alliances. Yet at the same time, nothing seems to have changed; the Israeli government which carries a heavy responsibility for the attack remains in power and more than 100 hostages are still hidden in the tunnels under Gaza, while men, women and children continue to die in unthinkable conditions on the soil above. I am struck by your struggle, as a public intellectual and private individual, to share your emotions and shape your thoughts with your readers in the many essays you’ve written since early October. Can you tell us about your intellectual and emotional evolution?
When you live in Israel and you believe, as strongly as I do, in human rights, you are mostly preoccupied with the politics of the present, in particular the folly and cruelty of the Occupation. But the events of Oct. 7 and the reactions of artists, intellectuals, the American campuses and various far-left parties throughout the world, merged and became, for me, one single event. This single event — made of two — propelled me into the Jewish past, and made me face the stunning possibility that antisemitism had not died, after all.
I was privileged enough to live in France, the USA, Israel, Germany which have all given me the feeling I was protected from the indignities of racism. But now, I am forced to reckon I was oblivious to a subterranean antisemitism that had been simmering below the surface. It is made of various ideologies, including Soviet-inspired anti-Zionism, politically radical Islam, and post-colonial undermining of the legitimacy of Israel. This antisemitism is more perverse than its predecessor because it is proffered in the name of progressive values, thereby creating enormous confusion on the Left, high jacking its rhetoric, and disempowering the Israel left itself. For example, a group of feminists signed a petition in the leftwing French news site Mediapart denouncing a letter published in the French Libération.
The “crime” of the Libération letter was its call to recognize that a feminicide on a mass-scale had occurred in Gaza. But the Mediapart’s so-called radical “feminists” could only see this letter as an “obscene” manipulation by Israel, an attempt to “womanwash” its own crimes by using words as feminicide. They explicitly refused to express any solidarity with the women who had been savagely raped, murdered and tortured. That a significant part of the Left was unable to name and denounce a crime against humanity because the victims were Israeli Jews, suggests to me a part of the Left has become anti-humanist, that it is no longer animated by the humanism which has been, historically, its moral impulse. It has dehumanized Israel in a way that is reminiscent of the worst hours of some left-wing regimes. The humanist Left I subscribe to does not do political score settling when so many, on both sides, die so brutally. It does not hierarchize deaths and victims. I am heartbroken by the unfathomable death toll in Gaza because I am a humanist and universalist. But I lost respect for segments of the Left, including the Jewish Left like Jewish Currents or The Jewish Voice of Peace, who were unable to live up to the demands of the hour and show compassion and solidarity with the victims of a pogrom.
On the subject of emotions, though not the awful ones you’ve just invoked, you published an important book last year, The Emotional Life of Populism, that turns out to have been tragically prescient. In the book, you present Israel as a democracy pas comme les autres — a democracy, built on a foundation of fear, that you describe as “securitist.” Could you say a bit more about this notion and what is suggests about Israeli politics both now and the “day after” the war in Gaza ends?
It is with no small historical irony that the early Zionists chose as a land for their national project a small territory tucked in a large area dominated by Arabs and Muslims, none of whom had any particular reason to welcome a handful of people from Eastern Europe initially backed by a foreign colonial power. While in the 1920’s. the revisionist Zionist leader Ze’ev Jabotinsky had been able to view Arabs’ opposition to the Jews as a predictable and understandable political reaction to colonialism, in the nascent Israeli consciousness, Arabs’ opposition to the Zionist project started filling the place left vacant by Amalek, the demonic figure of Jewish history: “They want to drive us into the sea” combined all in one the reality of Arab anti-colonial hostility with the plots and characters of Jewish unconscious, forever traumatized by an unredeemable history.
This is why we may say that Israel is not a democracy like others. Because of its geography and inner vulnerability, it was compelled to become a securitist democracy, perhaps with no equivalent in the world. This means that the state and the citizens are not only concerned with but constantly and actively mobilized to defend Israel. Survival is the key modus operandi of the country. Institutionally, this means that its army, police, secret services play a key role in the daily conduct of the state and that ‘security’ has become a key mental feature of citizens. Political life, morality and culture are a matrix of habits of thinking and acting which, in Israel, can be called securitism. What the events of Oct. 7 show are two things: that war, even the low intensity kind, is not politics by other means. It cannot replace politics, at least not in Israel; and that populist leaders like Benjamin Netanyahu are not only incapable of giving the security that stems only from overall political and military strength, but that they also willfully gamble with their nation to ruthlessly pursue their interests. Immoral, unprincipled leaders like Netanyahu are very dangerous to the very nation they pretend to represent and defend.
In an essay you wrote early last year in Le Monde, you analyzed the negotiations then taking place between Netanyahu and the extreme settler movements to form a new government, focusing on Netanyahu’s skill at manipulating fear as a political weapon. But you also described one of his prospective partners, Itamar Ben-Gvir, as a politician who exemplifies “Jewish fascism.” This is a label, you admitted, that still shocks you, but one that you nevertheless applied to Ben-Gvir and his movement. Can you explain why? And where do you think Netanyahu falls on this ideological spectrum? Is he “fascist-curious”? Or simply a desperate man driven to make these alliances by fear of falling from power?
A great deal of what we call fascism is driven both by ideology and by the self-absorbed, overbearing, authoritarian, violent personality of a leader. I think Benito Mussolini,who coined and enacted the word fascism more than a century ago, did so because of his personality at least as much as because he believed in it. Netanyahu does not exactly hold a fascist ideology — at least not until now — but he has aspects of the personality: He is paranoid, his main political tactic has been to relentlessly fuel hatred, and he has shown repeatedly that he is willing to sacrifice the interests of the nation for his own.
Never before in Israeli history has there been a leader so blatantly indifferent to the well-being of the country. The people who surround him —Ben Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich — are more overtly fascist. They believe in violence. Their camp murdered Yitzhak Rabin. They hold and defend Jewish supremacist views. Their declarations after Oct. 7 amounted to calls to genocide (even though I do not think Israel is committing genocide). But despite their differences I think all of them are united by a key attribute of fascism: They turn the political rival into an enemy and even traitor. The sons and daughters of pioneers who established Israel are now cast as traitors by them. Netanyahu excels at this and is responsible for the immense and dangerous fracture inside Israel.
Yes, Netanyahu is a skilled fearmonger. But along with fear, you cite three other emotions in your book that play pivotal roles in populist politics — disgust, resentment, and love of one’s country — and how they threaten the humanist and universalist values of liberalism. As for disgust, you wrote that if “fear is the privileged emotion of tyrants, disgust is the privileged emotion of racists.” Along with fear, does disgust — which you define as a “social emotion” — help explain what seems to be the blindness or indifference of many Israelis towards the mounting death toll of civilians in Gaza since Oct. 7?
The indifference of Israelis to the death toll has many reasons, not just one: Researchers in social psychology show that compassion is much less likely to emerge if you view the person who suffers as responsible for her suffering. Most Israelis believe that most Palestinians identify with Hamas and given that Hamas has perpetrated atrocities on Israeli soil, it is not only the sense of one’s territorial integrity that has been violated but one’s fundamental sense of security. Hamas is now demonized because it has shaken to the core Israeli sense of security and Palestinians are viewed as extensions of Hamas.
Another reason is that Israelis are curiously oblivious to their own power. They suffer from a chronic sense of vulnerability accompanied with the obsessive performance of power. This sense of vulnerability makes it difficult to view the enemy as weak. Third, Israel has often behaved according to a security doctrine which demanded that they overreact in order to dissuade the other side from repeating its attacks. Thus Israelis have become desensitized to the fact that their response exacts a high price in life. Fourth, I would say that the politics of the last two decades toward Palestinians has been catastrophic in isolating and strangling them. So Israelis have many less interactions with them, except in situations of domination (as workers or prisoners). When you view a group of human beings only through the mechanism and prism of domination, you dehumanize them (and yourself as well in the process.)
In your essays addressed to readers of Le Monde, Der Freitag, or Haaretz, you strive to make visible the darkness of what happened on Oct. 7. At the same time, you want to make no less visible the political and ideological context in Israel that enabled the massacre by Hamas. In yet another French leftwing newspaper, Libération, you wrote that “A context is neither a sufficient reason nor an explanation, but nevertheless one of the necessary elements to grasp the inextricable complexity of the situation” confronting Israel. In light of the deepening public schism within the war cabinet and growing public demonstrations on behalf of the hostages, what are your thoughts about the situation? Has it become yet more complex and inextricable? Or is there reason if not to hope, at least not to despair?
At some point or another, sooner or later, there will be a change of political leadership. A coalition of Benny Gantz and Gideon Sa’ar [former Likud Justice Minister who broke with the party two years ago to form New Hope] will emerge and we will breathe again a less toxic air. But 20 years of Netanyahu and of Likud control of the state apparatus has inflicted very deep damage on the ways in which state institutions are run, on constitutional norms, on the moral fabric of civil society and most tragically on the possibility to find a political solution to the conflict. I do not know if this or the next leadership will have the courage to engage in a political resolution of the conflict, but he will have to face a new situation: an entirely traumatized population a good part of which will not listen to words of peace. Never as now has peace seemed so necessary and never as now has it seemed so impossible to reach. This should not discourage us. Hope will not be given to Israelis by grace. It will have to be fought for very dearly by civil society.
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