Farewell to Bibi

Is the farewell to Netanyahu a farewell to the degeneration of the nation?

Farewell scene at a grave monument, Archaeological Museum of Athens  (Source)

In Homer, the concept of a "spoiler" doesn't exist. At any point throughout the text, a reminder of the story's end can (re)appear. Why? Because the story is truly known in advance. This is not just a poetic concept (or necessity), but the worldview of the culture in which he operates. Even the heroes know their end in advance, and moreover - they believe that the end of the story has already been determined by the gods and fate. The end is a given (and similarly: in tragedy). What is the space in which the Greek person, hero, and writer operate? Not in the struggle over what will happen, and what will be its end, nor even the most fateful question for modern man - whether he will die in Troy or return to his family, but how things will happen. Will he, for example, fall in glory as a hero, or in shame as a coward?

When Homer calls upon the Muses again and again right in the middle of the story, he's not asking them to help him tell what happened, but declaring what happened (even before it happened!) and asking them to help him tell h-o-w it happened. The idea of how - is the basis of the ethos that establishes Greek culture: how to conduct oneself and behave in any given situation, what is proper and what is beautiful. Therefore, it is also at the root of the famous Greek aesthetics, particularly its visuality. The design of the situation - and not its results. The Greek hero is trapped between the gods and rigid social dictates to the point of absurdity, expressed in the tragic gap between his understanding of the situation and what he actually does (the Trojans despise Paris who stole Helen and mock him, but are obligated to him, and so the entire Greek world is committed to the private injury to Menelaus and is dragged after him to Troy in a rigid alliance system that turns a local event into a world war, exactly like in World War I). What is left for this hero, who is moved like a marionette of history, gods, and circumstances? To be beautiful. To cut "fine" pieces from the sacrifice and share "properly", to boast and glorify - in other words: to be a hero. The what - has already been determined, but the how - is open. So pass the bummer smoothly, take it "like a man", and finish it "beautifully".

Hence the countless detailed visual descriptions and similes that fill the Homeric text. Those who think Homer was blind suffer from severe textual blindness (and perhaps, indeed, in the Odyssey, which is the work of an older man, and much inferior to the Iliad, we already see the weakening of the power of detailed and concrete imagery, in favor of the fantastic and the tendency towards memory and quotation of the familiar mythical story, including the plot's fantastic voyages, which are not part of the Iliad, Homer's magnum opus, in which Olympus is - worth noting - an entirely concrete space, and the gods are part of ordinary everyday life). As a narrator, the center of Homer's poetic interest is to tell how the thing happened - for instance, like what - and to add an epithet to every thing and every person. Not just Odysseus - but Odysseus of many devices (and so every other hero). And he didn't just kill him with a spear, but as an integral part of the dramatic act of killing, it will be described at length (self-evidently! This is not a modern literary trick to create tension) how the spear was magnificent, the shield beautiful, the armor shining and reinforced with gold decorations (and here will come a description of the decorations, in wonderful excess, of course).

The heroes' desire for the beautiful object (to take the decorated weapons from the enemy) is often greater than their desire for their own lives, and even costs them their lives. And what bothers them most is if they didn't behave properly - or if their beautiful prize was taken from them. It's not the desire for the beauty of the stolen woman that drives the plot, neither with Helen nor with her sophisticated reflection Briseis, but for the beauty of how to behave. And if one doesn't behave properly, that's really irritating. And that's why Achilles is in a sulk. In a su-su-sulk with a friend, with another Greek hero. With this one, with that one, with this one and that one, in a su-su-sulk with everyone. And he sulks and he's angry and won't want to reconcile and didn't eat and didn't drink and didn't this and didn't that (and here, one might say you know the Iliad by heart).

And even when Achilles of the beautiful hair and form eliminates Hector's brother and boasts before him with final words before the death blow that he should see how handsome and beautiful and tall his killer is, it's not out of perverse hubris, but because this is the most important thing in life - not "life itself" or death - but: the design of the moment. And Homer's beautiful literary design, which places literary beauty as paramount (unlike the poetic interests of many other beautiful texts in the ancient world), is an integral part of this design, for the heroes have a literary consciousness (!). They don't care about dying, but what matters is what will be said and told about them in future generations - their glory. Homer's metapoetic consciousness understands that there is no heroism without a plot, and no Achilles without the Iliad. Just as the spear is beautiful - so is the story, and therefore it is also written in meter, as befits, as the formal embodiment of beautiful conduct. In biblical prose, what matters first and foremost is the content, and it is king (literally) - while in Homeric poetry, form is queen.

From here we arrive at the depth of Homer's poetic innovation in the Iliad. In terms of describing the consciousness of the heroes and its relation to the gods, and the sequence of semi-fantastic plots, and the ability to compose a long epic, there is no fundamental innovation here compared to, for example, the Epic of Gilgamesh, a millennium before. Those can be compared, for instance, to the Odyssey, which is narratively inferior, where there are good and bad and also ridiculous - in a very unconvincing way, for example in the matter of the slaughtered suitors - unlike the Iliad where there are no good and no bad and even Paris is described with compassion and nobility, not to mention the Trojans. Everyone evokes identification (although it's clear that Homer is a man of the Peloponnese, and from its western side, and although the source and center of the plot is on its eastern side, the center of his identification and deep familiarity is with the geography and heroes of the west like Nestor and Odysseus). What matters to Homer is not what/who is good or bad (a biblical question, not relevant), but who is beautiful and what is pleasing.

Homer's genius innovation lies in the fact that he found a completely new way h-o-w to write a long and complex text (properly, he would certainly add), and he, in fact, invents the novel. Homer is the creator of the long form in literature - not as a concatenation and assembly of shorter forms, but as a form in itself. The essence of the Iliad as a long text is not to describe a long plot, over a long time - but to describe it in d-e-t-a-i-l: how things happened. The complexity does not stem from the extension in time, but from obsessive detail in space. And this was understood, for example, by S. Yizhar, when he tried to shape an Israeli Iliad of the War of Independence (but failed in the genre, when he chose poetic fiction, which is prone to endless curly excess, instead of a short-lined epic poetic narrative, and thus we lost the Israeli epic).

Therefore, unlike the Bible, Gilgamesh, and the Odyssey, there is no sequence of connected plots here (and the seams and tears are always noticeable), but a unified story. Unlike them, the Iliad is not a long sequence of plots, but a long sequence of plot (and the plot itself - actually very short and dense). The detail in the plot is what creates the phenomenon of tension, and even the phenomenon of identification (Bibism), and not the surprise at its end (was anyone surprised when Bibi was ousted?). This was a literary discovery of the first order, and it is as effective on human consciousness today as it was then (although it is very worn out, and stretched even to pastiche, see Knausgård). The Iliad is a movie, that is, with the volume of a big cinema, and not a television series in installments, like the Odyssey, where all this and more will be told in the next episode.

And people, what can you do, love plots and larger-than-life heroes, not a series of governments sloppily glued one after another, united only by an artificial timeline (the volume comes from space, from the ability to grasp a vast space as a whole. Even Proust was the project of turning time into space). The human brain prefers complete essays, where Bibi who shoots in the headline closes the last act, and not just a string of paragraphs.

But is Bibi a hero? Was there a Greek tragedy here, in which he brought about his own downfall? Do we identify hubris here - and therefore also catharsis? These are very ridiculous questions. For Bibi is precisely the ultimate representation of the idea opposite to the Greek world, and deeply rooted in Jewish anti-aesthetics, according to which it doesn't matter at all how one behaves, how one should and how beautiful and what is pleasing and respectable and acceptable, but only what the result is. The world is structured according to good and bad (us and them of course), and not according to beautiful and ugly. Therefore, the ultra-Orthodox world, whose anti-aesthetics, and disregard for appearance and visuality (and therefore! for statehood) is an all-encompassing ideology (from sweat and obesity to misery and neglect, and through the general pashkvillic [Translator's note: referring to wall posters common in ultra-Orthodox communities] shouting that breaks records of tastelessness, Holocaust!!) - had a deep identification with Bibi. Because it identified in him a partner in the Jewish resistance project to Western aesthetics. And for anyone who shares some European aesthetics (that is, originally Greek), his tenure seemed one of the ugliest and lowest possible, and as far from Jabotinsky's splendor as Israel is from Europe (and indeed, the distance has greatly lengthened).

The collision between the system of proper legal conduct, appropriate norms and normative appearance, and someone for whom the means don't matter, but only the result, is not some unfortunate historical mishap - but almost a formal necessity. Bibi is the embodiment of the cheeky and ugly Israeli - not Homer dropped by for a visit, but Homer (just without the humor). Israeli craftiness is the idea that "it doesn't matter how", and Jewish ugliness in the manner of conduct is the refusal to think in terms of how it looks from the outside and what the aesthetics of the action are (which of course provokes antisemitism, which is a kind of aesthetic taste, above all, and therefore its pure expression is not hatred but disgust). A sober assessment of Bibi will easily discern that he was not an exceptionally evil person, but exceptionally disgusting, and his great damage was concentrated in the ethos and aesthetics of society. It wasn't heroic hubris that brought Bibi down, but the aesthetics of pettiness, scheming, shouting and kitsch, and indeed he didn't fall as a hero - but as a mouse, still trying to find some hole. Did anyone expect catharsis here?

But where did such anti-aesthetic aesthetics come to our parts from? What is the source of Bibism? For this, one must locate the aesthetics that was replaced, and understand where such an extreme reaction came from. Well, if Bibi was the ultimate embodiment of breaking "Beautiful Israel", then there was no one who embodied the previous aesthetics, the opposite, anti-Bibist one, more than Amos Oz. These two are the thesis and antithesis of the turning point in Israeli aesthetics, the beautiful Israeli who shoots and cries - and the ugly Israeli with a constant snicker, like a kind of spasm, on his face. Only against the background of the schmaltzy beautification to which the soul of the left deteriorated can one understand the ugliness to spite that the soul of the right deteriorated to, seized with disgust (that is, aesthetic rejection) from the "beautiful souls". And we have no finer affair than the Galia Oz affair to understand the depth of the aesthetic failure to which the Bibist avant-garde reacted. Needless to say, it is not the people themselves who will concern us here, but the literary presentation they raised for us, and therefore all that is said below is not meant about the people themselves as actors - but as characters.

In every system of severe and prolonged abuse, there are always two sides that bear responsibility and derive some perverse narcissistic gain from it - one sadistic, and the other masochistic. In this story, as is evident to any rational person, Galia was the sadist. But Amos Oz - was the masochist. Any reasonable and truly good father, whose daughter behaved in such a way, and lost her humanity in such an irreparable manner, and turned into a merciless revenge machine without conscience that delves into her victimhood with infinite narcissism, would know how to set some kind of boundary. Not so the righteous man from Arad, Israel's number one beautiful soul. And the private case would not be particularly interesting if it were not such a beautiful reflection of the general case, teaching us well where righteousness becomes a crime (both towards the righteous person himself, but also towards the criminal, who needs first and foremost a proper blow from reality) - and beautification and compassion are themselves cruelty and lack of ethics.

For it is clear to any observer with a basic aesthetic sense that the theatrical spectacle of the Oz family was presented to us only to reflect (in a somewhat symmetrical and overly transparent analogy) the failure of the left towards the Palestinians, who lost their human image in the phenomenon of suicide bombings, and only endless and boundless beautification still allows Israeli identification with them - and with the victim narrative they fell in love with to death. Any reasonable observer sees here a morality play, describing the psychological damage of beautification not only to the beautiful soul himself, but to the object of his beauty - objectified as a victim (poor Palestinian child), to the point of aesthetic loss of way, which is also an ethical loss of way.

And if we listen for a moment to Galia Oz's words, we will discover why the ethical and the aesthetic are inextricably linked here. For there is no point in paying attention to the content of her words, but precisely because of this our attention wanders to the formal and aesthetic element, and here we discover a terrifying reflection: Amos Oz in the form of a woman, and a daughter whose speaking style is a copy of her father's style, but the content - opposite. The same symmetries in every sentence - out of belief in the righteousness of the phrasing, and in correct phrasing that becomes (therefore!) righteous. Belief in symmetry - and symmetry in belief. The same emphases, pauses, dramatics, that are in love with the phrasing itself - and therefore - - with themselves. The same self-enchantment with words, which causes strong self-belief, the ability to instruct a way. That is: the same burning belief that beautiful, overly symmetrical phrasing, to the point of beautification, is related to correctness, as if logic is subordinate to rhetoric - and ethics and aesthetics are one. After all, the phrasings are "correct", aren't they? How many sermons have we heard, built on ideas of parallelism - for unacceptable ideas (in reality).

The whole idea that a writer with fine phrasings and rich language is a political guide is built on this mistaken identification, which failed Oz's literary creation, which relies on flowery language and sophisticated structure as a substitute for literary innovation, and also his political life's work. And surprisingly, it turns out that excessive forgiveness and turning the other cheek is also not a recipe for family relationships. The weak is not always right, sometimes he is a great scoundrel, terrorist and evil, even if he is Palestinian, and even if he is your daughter. And any leftist smearing of this simple, cutting and painful (and alas - u-g-l-y) truth - but truth! - is a failure in seeing reality, that over-identification with those who should not be identified with, and an attempt to believe in symmetry where there is no symmetry - has completely blurred it. Ugliness must be called by its name - ugliness (and there is no other way to describe the behavior of the "victims" here).

And unfortunately, the ugly has a very ugly trait, which is that it also makes you ugly. The violent criminal also forces you (the symbolic father) to be violent. And the desire to be beautiful at all costs, and to see yourself as beautiful in the mirror, even when you have no choice but to be ugly, is to blame for the Bibist counter-movement, which celebrates ugliness, and the source of the aesthetic break we are in. When everyone doesn't know that the ugly is ugly - that's ugly. In Homer you will never find such Israeli confusion between the beautiful and the ugly (on both sides), and it is clear what he would think about the victim aesthetics (Christian), or about the Muslim "heroism" aesthetics (suicide bomber in a restaurant).

Homer never forgets for a moment who is to blame for the conflict (the Trojans, who are by the way the weaker side, and even the conquered, and the ultimate victim in the end), but all this is not relevant to his aesthetics, which is how to behave (even when you have been severely wronged). But anyway, the question of blame is not such a troubling question in the Homeric world, where man is a victim of the gods and circumstances, and one can only wonder what would happen if it were replaced in our world too by the aesthetic question of how one should behave (and this - on both sides of the conflict). The Iliad marks for us a horizon beyond the obsession with good and evil (and good and bad people) that has taken over our public imagination, to such an extent that we are not able to see through other categories at all, for example aesthetic ones (even the pursuit of justice can be very ugly). If once and for all we were to give up the fixation on good and evil (in our eyes, that is, for us) - the world would be more beautiful.

But since modern consciousness, which has already been contaminated by the monotheistic tree of knowledge of good and evil, cannot be Greek, one of the more sobering ways to assess the degree of guilt of two sides in any historical conflict is simply to divide it in a rough estimate of tens of percentages between them. There will never be one side responsible for one hundred percent (not even Hitler against the Jews, who also have a guilt of a few single percentages in the Holocaust, when he sweeps about 95 percent, and it should be remembered that guilt is not justification). There are many conflicts in which the blame is divided between the sides about 50/50, but whoever wants to claim this regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is severely flawed in his vision, and even whoever wants to blame them for 90 percent is certainly biased. If we try to generalize this violent conflict from its beginning to our days, that is, since the first Intifada (which is the 1929 riots, and for those not versed in gematria, 1929 is less than 1948), a more reasonable estimate is perhaps 70 percent blame to the Palestinians and 30 to the Jews. If someone claims it's 80 or 60 percent, we won't argue, but to place the majority of blame on the Jews requires an unreasonable degree of unhealthy blindness, or just healthy anti-Semitic bias.

But since ethics is disconnected from aesthetics, and neither the beautiful is the righteous, nor - in the opposite version - the ugly (as if naivety itself is a justification for deception, for it is European and innocent that suffers from beautification of reality), the question of how to behave can be disconnected from the question of justification. One behaves as one should (and not, as "they" behaved, for then we will be dragged into a spiral of ugliness). Hence, a project of aesthetic and literary rehabilitation is needed for Israeli society from the Bibist ground zero, which like any aesthetic return project (in short: renaissance) turns back to the ancient aesthetic models, and constitutes a more sober synthesis between Oz's naive and fake thesis and Bibi's cunning and "authentic" antithesis.

After all, Homer's entire enterprise was such a renaissance project, which tried - and succeeded - to revive the ethos of Greek heroism and aesthetics, after the Greek Dark Age, also called the Greek Middle Ages. This period of general decline - without significant cultural creation, in a crisis between the Bronze Age and the Iron Age - lasted for hundreds of years, which separated Homer from the world he writes about, and whose values and culture he tried to revive. Odysseus for Homer was like Homer for Renaissance people. Alternatively, what happens to a culture that does not undergo a renaissance - we can see today in the art of the Greek Orthodox Church (as opposed to the Catholic one), which remained in the Middle Ages, when the entire Greek world turned into a site - archaeological and touristic - that is, a dead world. But after about two thousand years of Jewish anti-aestheticist tendency, which are our Middle Ages, the most aesthetic model we can return to is not the Greek (which was never ours, to Aaron Shabtai's dismay), but that from the Iron Age - the biblical.

Is it possible to imagine a kind of Greek Bible, containing in a unified literary framework not only Homer, but also the tragedies, Plato, Euclid, Herodotus, etc., that is, putting all the achievements of Greek culture into one ideational and historical framework, or including all the world of myth and history in one long sequence? As a complex literary achievement, the Bible surpasses Homer and the entire epic genre, because it allows the story to maintain the mythical tension, and therefore the narrative, over a much wider (and orders of magnitude) time frame, from a much more historical view of myth. The mythical greatness and literary volume do not belong only to the glorious distant past, but manage to maintain ongoing and creative relevance, in a growing series of separate stories. Not just the story of the pioneers from the heroic period (the Zionist story), or the story of one great larger-than-life hero (Bibi?), but giving great mythical meaning to a long sequence of linked stories, just as governments rise and fall, each with its own story. Thus the Bible also allows the advantages of the complexity of great literature (what Homer spreads in space it spreads in time), and also the flexibility to add more and more stories (and genres) to it, as history progressed, until it became the giant work it is today.

The biblical model of linking stories under one ideational framework allows for aesthetics that have relevance to ongoing and changing history (in the democratic style), and not just to the one messianic story (which does not exist in the Bible), which could destroy the Zionist project. That is, the Bible produces a model that allows the Jewish story to return to history. Therefore, the question is not whether it was possible to create a Greek Bible, but whether a Jewish Homer can arise, who will create a biblical renaissance, with the help of a new form of plot, which will return the ethos to the Jewish state? The severe structural problem of the democratic framework today is that it has no narrative model, and therefore it constitutes a constant aesthetic and identification problem (the least bad of existing systems...), since it resembles a jumpy and incoherent string of stories lacking unity.

And the democratic story is important for Israel, for it is its main channel for a sustainable connection with Western culture. Even from a geopolitical perspective, the construction of the world map as a group of democratic countries against non-democratic countries is the most desirable for Israel, which would be the big winner from such an alliance (as one of the most threatened democracies in the world), and in addition also the only configuration capable of overcoming the Russian-Chinese axis of evil, and completely isolating it. South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Australia, India, Israel, Europe, Britain, USA, Canada, and the democracies of Central and South America, including Brazil, are a much stronger axis than the Chinese giant and the Russian bully, which can certainly create a democratic hegemony in the world, which would be significantly stronger than any Chinese superpower attempt. Israel has already made initial efforts to establish the democratic axis, with the help of its strengths (for example: as an intelligence alliance), but the way to defining the global system as democratic countries against all the rest is still long, and depends on a democratic vision with constitutive identity and identification power, that is, a new great Western story. And this is in contrast to the lack of identification evoked by the democratic plot today, with heroes like Bibi. Because with such heroes - enemies are needed. Therefore, only systematic demonization of the Chinese and Russian demons can create a new Western framework story (as Bibi himself discovered, that his story, which unified his erratic plot, was Iran). And when the world reorganizes itself in a structure of war against the forces of evil and the "bad guys", then maybe we can finally find ourselves on the side of the good guys, and not just the ugly ones.