Eichmann in Toronto

 

by Judith Deutsch

Adolf Eichmann, 1942.

Last week the president of the U of T allowed the Jewish Defense League, bolstered by Toronto police, to break up, brutalize and physically assault anti-genocide protesters on the campus encampment. This was even reported in Ha-aretz but not in local news. In this article I liken the president, Merick Gertler, to Hannah Arendt’spicture of Nazi Adolph Eichmann. He was in charge of deporting Jews to concentration camps. Arendt writes of the “banality of evil”, Eichmann’s mindlessness, the absence of self-observation and self-criticism for whom humans were mere numbers, “out of sight out of mind.”

For those who don’t know, the Jewish Defense League(JDL)is a fanatical organization brought together by Meir Kahane, whose member Baruch Goldstein perpetrated the Hebron cave massacre, and it was classified as a terrorist organization in Israel, the U.S., but not in Canada. The JDL leader in Canada accompanied former prime minister Stephen Harper on a trip to Israel. The JDL’s political wing in Israel is Kach.

I have directly witnessed the JDL at Toronto protests against Israel: dressed like Hell’s Angels, riding motorcyles within a hair’s breadth of us, gesticulating with masturbatory gestures in counterprotests.

Here is what I wrote to Merick Gerller at the U of T, and to the similar president of York University here in Toronto. I wrote that I am a psychoanalyst and have worked with people of all levels of education, different classes and ethnic groups and genders – and have seen these people capable of looking inside themselves, capable of self-criticism and self-understanding as many also strive to change their societies. I pointed out that the worldwide protests about Gaza indicates the capacity to see brutality, gratuitous sadism, to feel empathy for the misery and lifelong suffering of others. It doesn’t take a mental health professional to know this.

I ask what these university presidents tell themselves. Do they sit in the “sty of contentment” (T.S. Eliot) in a neoliberal delusion of the possibility of eternal life? I receive emails about Nightlife Singles Party in Tel Aviv – clearly these are people not living in terror or thinking of death.

Are Israel and the U.S. incapable of assessing the blowback? The resurgence of Islamic/Isis terrorism, or Yemen’s impressive technological advances in missiles that evade Israeli and US interception and that now reach central Israel? How will crazy Israel and the U.S. respond? Both rely on nuclear weapons: “all options are on the table” is code for nuclear. They rationalize MAD (mutually assured destruction). Judaism’s foundation story valorizes Samson: the story of his immense strength and his suicidal terrorist act of pulling down the pillars of a temple and killing thousands of people, is told and retold to Jewish youth throughout their education.

The background context: here’s one week of world news about an incredibly destabilized world of immense privilege and misery — and absurdity, all seemingly ignored by the neoliberal people of influence, power, and silence.

UN cuts aid efforts after Israeli evacuation order.

Dozens killed in Sudan as rains cause flood surge and burst dam;

Africa to finally receive first batch of mpox vaccines weeks after they have been made available in other parts of the world;

Taliban law bans women from speaking in public,

Flooding forces 300,000 into emergency shelters in Bangladesh,

Thousands flee after rebels bomb Rohingya villagers,

Australia expands resettlement programme to expel immigrants

Minister seeks fishing deal to aid endangered penguins in South Africa,

Microbeads proliferate at alarmingly high rate as India’s personal care and beauty industry is one of the largest markets in the world.

Needed: A new diagnostic nosology of Psychosis, Psychopathy.

Judith Deutsch is a psychoanalyst in Toronto. She is former president of Science for Peace. She can be reached at judithdeutsch0@gmail.com           

https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/09/18/eichmann-in-toronto/