“You have to choose, with the gun on the chest: Iran or Israel?” The most difficult questions are the questions you ask yourself, for example now that I am on my way to Otemba, Daring Womena music theater production that will have its world premiere on Thursday evening 19 June in the Holland Festival, Amsterdam.
That sounds festive, that world premiere, you see the smoothly falling jackets for you. I have also prepared myself differently, I have read and know that I can expect a ‘renewed, decolonizing perspective on the past’. 17th century voices from Japan and the former Dutch East Indies, and those of the 21st century, from present-day Indonesia and Amsterdam. Lots of perspectives, the other side of colonial history, the difference between the male and female gaze through times and cultures. A bowl full of different bonbons served in peacetime.
But in my head he humans ‘all or nothing’ question, ‘Israel of Iran’, who also makes me angry, because I remember how to appear on an inspection, after which two more re-inspections for military service in the 1980s. Did I have trouble with violence? “The Russians keep your girl under shot, only you can free her armor?”
Of course I said the girl had to be a boy or a man. “No problem.” I said I didn’t see Russians but Chinese. “But they are Russians.” Finally, I started a long answer, why I didn’t believe in this kind of dichotome pistol questions, one or the other, because there are always several perspectives, etc. In the end I was rejected.
But decades later I became my own interrogator. I hear myself panting while I bike the bridge by bike to the Amsterdam Muziekgebouw on the IJ: “Israel.”
That went with a hurry, while it had been a no-brainer for me ten, twenty years ago. Full of Israel. But since the country is ruled by a prime minister who laps all human rights and puts all the UN judgments aside, it seems that the official ideology of the country is still based exclusively on the thinking of German lawyer Carl Schmitt (1888-1985). He lived long enough to have been in full Nazi. In 1933 he was already a member of the NSDAP, and then he had his reference German legal science in his fight against the Jewish Spirit Still keep (1936). So it was abolished at the same time as Hitler, you would think, but Schmitt, the complicated yet clearly clear philosopher continues to be intrigued by his radical power thinking. “The highlights of great politics are at the same time the moments when the enemy appears clearly and concretely as an enemy.” For Netanyahu’s Israel there are many ‘highlights’: the Palestinians as such, Hezbollah, Houthis, Hamas, the Gazans in particular, and now Iran. The Israeli Prime Minister Schmitt’s idea will also fully endorse that ‘the friend-enemy distinction is essential for politics’. And that the answer to the enemy must be an all -destructive attack.
In fact, de facto this Nazi power thinker became the home ideologist of Israel. I can call a few other countries, where that is also the case, but with Israel it is at its wider.
The room opens, Otemba Starts, with all those overlapping perspectives. And again I choose Israel above Iran. Carl Schmitt has won from my speech and my sense of legalness.
Stephan Sanders is an essayist.