Edith Lutz
Down the Abyss with Macbeth - Birnam Wood is Marching Towards Netanyahu
Macbeth, in Shakespeare’s famous tragedy, is a Scottish nobleman. Rank and name are of little importance. More relevant, the story of Macbeth’s moral descent leading to his mental and physical destruction is a demonstration of the consequences when one is unable to recognize or acknowledge his errors and to correct them. Without self-examination or help from outside the descent into one’s own ruin seems inevitable.
At the beginning of the tragedy Macbeth is introduced as a person of contradictory but predominantly good character: he is courageous, sensitive, noble and loyal. Due to a possibly misinterpreted vision by three witches predicting the royal crown for Macbeth, he commits a fatal mistake. Concealing his error another one follows, a third, a fourth. Each new breach of the law serves for covering up preceding ones. Macbeth commits murder and lets others murder for him. He lies and plants spies in the homes of other rulers. In his desperate, paranoid condition he imagines enemies everywhere. The more desperate the situation becomes , the more he loses his sense of morality. He sees no possibility of turning back. He must continue to kill until he is himself killed. Disguising themselves as the forest of Birnam Wood with branches, the hostile army approaches Macbeth, fulfilling another vision of the witches: Birnam Wood is marching towards the destruction of Macbeth.
If the stage is transferred from Scotland to Israel, a comparison can be made. Netanyahu, too, is said to compensate former misconducts by further ones and even worse ones. There are more and more voices that interprete Netanyahu’s adherence to war or warlike destruction as a desperate attempt not to lose his position of power. They accuse him of using attacks on Gaza in order to sidetrack the public attention away from his juridical and inner-political problems. It is possible that still unknown factors may also play a role in his diversionary tactics, besides those well-known ones, such as his process of corruption. In how far he himself is responsible for enabling the horrible invasion of October 7 is a question that still remains unanswered, because of the enduring social state of shock, fear and paralysis. Like Macbeth, so Netanyahu seems to be driven by fear, as his former chief of the intelligence service, Ami Ayalon, confirms, „He is always afraid.“[i]
But Macbeth Netanyahu is only continuing what his predecessors began. The Zionist leaders had a vision, just as Macbeth had in the beginning of his career. The first Zionist’s vision was not a crown, but land: Eretz Jisrael, as they called it. After centuries of persecution and cruel pogroms they dreamt of an untroubled life where it would be possible to participate in work that had always been barred to them in their countries of origin, such as agriculture.
But here the first fatal error occurs: they excluded the Arab population from their agricultural activities. The Arab farmers who had tilled the land as tenants until the big landowners sold it to Zionist agencies were not only deprived of their means of livelihood but saw an alien mentality increasingly invading their country. They fought back with attacks. Counter-attacks by the immigrants followed. Warning voices advocating for dialogue instead of violence were disregarded. These first mistakes went unrecognised or were ignored during the years that followed.
The scope of violations increased. Before the state of Israel was founded, the destruction of Arab villages had begun. Destruction and expulsion were continued during the war of 1948. During the following years the evidence of this destruction was removed; parks and forests were created to conceal any evidence of former Arab villages. The need to cover over mistakes required misleading propaganda. Instead of Macbeth‘s spies, institutions were created to observe any criticism of Israeli politics and to stigmatize those who dared to speak out, labelling them as „antisemites“. Dubious methods according to the Roman strategy „Divide and rule“ were applied. Israel saw enemies everywhere; it felt compelled to kill and to have others kill. Had Israel become a reincarnation of Macbeth?
Behind political decisions are people. Comparing Benjamin Netanyahu to Macbeth, enormous fear and total helplessness become visible behind a facade of self-confidence and linguistic scills Self-examination seems no longer possible, and good friends seem non existent. How badly garded is our Israel, observed the rabbi of Bacherach in Heinrich Heine’s unfinished novel of the same name: „False friends guard its gates from without and within its watchers are folly and fear”. [ii] Alleged friends are helping Israel with an arsenal of weapons of dangerous enormity. This delivery may be useful in calming the conscience of those who feel historical guilt, but it does not banish the fears of its recipient. Israel sees itself surrounded by enemies. Anxiety is exacerbated by the feeling of having no one to rely upon. The experience of the holocaust proved that this anxiety is not unfounded. Even after the atrocities had become known, hardly any country was willing to accept the traumatized exiles.
With an egomaniac friend in America, a Lady at his side and subdued to the dictation of fascist members of government, a positive turn cannot be expected for and with Macbeth Netanyahu. Public opinion has long sinced turned against Netanyahu and the wood of Birnam is approaching. The wood is moving in his own country, with demonstrators in large numbers against his politics. It is moving on the sea with flotillas, it is moving with pro-Palestinian demonstrations worldwide. Wherever the wood is growing it cannot be held back. It seems the largest step in the escalation model has been reached: Together in the abyss.
Can a solution still be found at this step? Perhaps. If reals friends of Israel stop their delivery of weapons and instead support peace and human rights groups in Israel, financially, ideologically and by promoting dialogue. Peace cannot be won by force, it can only be approached patiently, step by step. The path to peace demands an effort to approach “the other side,” the courage to voice facts openly, and a feeling of empathy with the adversary which can enable a joint search for solutions.
If, in the spirit of Martin Buber, those Jewish voices that demand a „Stop! Back!“ get multiplied, there will be real choices. The philosopher Buber, a Zionist, who warned his Jewish contemporaries against counter-violence and a hostile attitude towards Arabs, maintained 1958: „Our historic returning to our land has been realized through a wrong gate.“ [iii] It was a nationalistic gate, that ignored the values of Jewish ethics. The „right door“ is still open. There still remains a spark of hope that it will be found just in time.
[i] Alexis Bloom, The Bibi files: https://www.imdb.com/de/title/tt33338697/
[ii] https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Works_of_Heinrich_Heine/Vol._1/The_Rabbi_of_Bacharach (line 217)
[iii] Martin Buber „Israel and the Command of the Spirit“. In: A Land of Two Peoples, 2005. Quoted and translated from the German original.