The ideology of hatred

But there is also hatred as an operation of power. Israel's persistent claim that it has no partner for peace is, I would claim, part of an ideology of hatred. The role of Israel's no-partner myth is to portray the Palestinians as primitive and warmongering and in this way it hopes to circumvent and conceal its own desire to receive moral approval from the Palestinians.

Once we understand how hatred operates as an apparatus of power relations, and particularly how the discourse of hatred is motivated and mobilized in national conflicts, serious questions about misrecognition, veiled desires and symptomatic expressions arise. These questions have, to a large extent, been left unaddressed in studies of hatred between groups in conflict.

NG: I am not sure I follow.

NY: Sometimes when we desire something that is unthinkable (for example, the love of someone who is forbidden) and we repress our desire, it ends up surfacing in different ways. In the book, I examine language, laws, and practices that hide that which is repressed; namely, the desires we either fear or refuse to admit to ourselves.

We know that when a child tells his father "I hate you," it could mean "I don't receive the love I want from you." Hate speech often represents such veiled desires and fears. The disavowal of our desires and the misrecognition of our fears are defense mechanisms, and these mechanisms, I claim, can have extremely dangerous effects.

So, for me, this intense ideology of hatred signifies the return of the repressed; the return of that which is denied and reappears as a symptom in "hate" speech and practice. I therefore consider the cultivation of hatred in national discourse to be a psychic political defense strategy. Of course on the individual level hate can be accompanied by a visceral experience, but as a political concept and as part of the national discourse hatred is a word that serves more to conceal than to reveal.

NG: So you are saying that there is something new going on here? How is today's ideology of hatred different from other forms of hatred we witnessed during the 20^th century?

NY: I am not saying there is something necessarily new, but rather that we need to broaden our understanding of the ideology of hatred, its motivations and the way it operates.

Anti-Semitism is an ideology of hatred, and so are racism and homophobia. But studies of anti-Semitism have taken hatred as an obvious emotion of separation and exclusion. What I am saying is that that the concept of hatred is much more ambivalent than we tend to acknowledge, and that without understanding the attachment and intimate relations between the Jews and non-Jews in Germany we cannot really understand the hatred.

The fear of 'Judaization' (Verjudung) or 'Jewification' of German culture, the fear of the 'Jewish spirit' overtaking the German nation, was not only a fear of contamination and contagion, as many scholars have remarked. These concepts allude to a deeper anxiety regarding the invasion of the German body, in spirit and mind, from within. Thus, this anxiety signifies a deep sense of intimacy and perhaps a desire to mimic the Jew. Psychoanalytically speaking, such prohibited thought often transforms itself into a symptomatic form of speech and behavior. This approach to the concept of hatred leads me to ask what, for example, the relation is between intimacy and genocide.

NG: Am I correct then to say that you are using the term ideology not in the Marxist or liberal way, but rather in a way that is more attuned to psychoanalysis?

NY: To a certain extent, yes. The point I want to make is that we need to start thinking about the ideology of hatred as a symptom of desire. This might sound contradictory to many people, but actually hatred is always constructed within an already inevitable bond between two unequal groups or sides of rival power. Intense hatred assumes a prior and intense relationship.