After 1945, in the light of the genocide against Jewish people, it was absolutely necessary to speak of hatred against otherness. Jews were historically and systematically excluded from public life, political participation, and full citizenship and rights. They became the emblem of exclusion and segregation, eternal nomads, prophets of the world capable of pointing out the excesses of kings and rulers. They were the “others” of Europe. However, “Europe” was “Christian Europe”. “Jew” was not only a self-assumed name, but also a Christian denomination. Europe started the history of its world hegemony in Castilla, expelling both Muslims and Jews. But after this point, Europe remained both Jewish and Muslim through philosophy, knowledge, institutions, and a shared Book. This means that this was not a history of interiority and exteriority, but a history of an unbearable proximity, of unstable and fuzzy borders.
Ethnocentrism starts by thinking that there is something absolutely proper and original called the West. There is no possible criticism of the West without the acknowledgment that it consists of large parts of non-originally Western thoughts, words, institutions, ideas, and technologies. Nietzsche reminds us that the Greek genius was not due to some radical power of innovation. They showed above all “gastric powers”, the ability, like cows, to ruminate the cultures surrounding them, being capable of processing their contributions without suffering indigestion.
This was not a history of interiority and exteriority, but a history of an unbearable proximity, of unstable and fuzzy borders.
There is nothing absolutely interior or exterior about Christianity, Judaism, or Islam in relation to Europe. It is more accurate to say that these sister religions systematically tore Europe apart—first through conflicts among Jews, Christians, and Muslims, and later between Catholics and Protestants. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are, among all world religions, the closest to one another. Most conflicts and wars did not stem from a traumatic encounter with otherness, but from an unbearable proximity. They shared the mythical origins of Genesis, embraced monotheism, and upheld the ideas of revelation and redemption. It was not the roles of Moses, Christ, or Muhammad that led to the quarrel, but rather the radically unstable nature of otherness inherent in their relationship. In other words, the instability of proximity and otherness—not otherness alone—was the source of tension.
The first murder recorded in the Bible is fratricide. Far away, so close. The unknown may cause vague fear, but proximity burns. Even when different worldviews clash, proximity leads to unease. We can read in several testimonies of the first Spaniards on American soil how impressed they were by the Aztec and Inca empires, the sizes of their cities, their social and political organization, architecture, etc. A discussion about the humanity of “natives” arose not only because of cultural distances, but on the contrary, because of an unbearable proximity. How can humanity, created by the only God could lead to this? Could I be part of this? Could this have been my destiny? How is it that God didn’t reveal to them? How can such a culture flourish without being Jewish, Christian, or Muslim? Otherness was not “evidence”, but a product, a construction to make conquest legal and morally acceptable.
Absolute otherness is no origin of violence. On the contrary, violence needs to construct otherness, to stabilize it. The New Spain needed a highly sophisticated system of “races”, called “castas”, which tried to distribute people and with it, their rights.
Genocide in Palestine is no different. Israel and Palestine are as close as Judaism and Islam. They even share their most sacred place on earth: Jerusalem. Again, this shared core is precisely the cause of conflict. Without force of law or legitimacy Israel had to rely on a triple strategy:
a) a political theology that could legitimize occupation on religious grounds, when international law was absent;
b) the moral guilt of the West, willing to pay the highest price to legitimize itself as a fair political project for the world;
c) a fundamentally European political and philosophical discourse that made the Jews not only the emblem but also the only cultural group entitled to be called a victim, their absolute victim.
Genocide is thus grounded in the theological-political thesis of the chosen people; at the same time the West offered unlimited support to Israel against every possible enemy for social, political and economic reasons; finally the historical tragedy of the holocaust allowed the construction of “the Jew” as a sacred figure, exempt of all moral justification, what has been capitalized for violating every law. This allowed the heyday of Zionism, which turned politics into a holy war, with the military and political support of the big world powers. An alleged sacredness was captured in the concept of “otherness”, such that any criticism against the policies of Israel would be taken as a demonstration of antisemitism.
On one front, Israel was following a colonial and expansionist strategy. On the ideological level, it monopolized the figure of the victim to ensure its own impunity. At a philosophical level, we still lack the precise concepts to grasp the transit of victims to victimizers due to our conceptualization of otherness as pure distance, as heterogeneity. In the end, we should reconsider the role of the unbearable proximity of the neighbor as a source of this extreme violence, and at the same time that we denounce genocide.
