The ideology of hatred

The colonizer's desire of the colonized signifies an unconscious politics according to which the colonizer must keep the colonized subject alive. Only when the colonizer becomes indifferent to the life of the other does genocide or ethnic cleansing may occur. This leads me to maintain that acknowledging intimacy may actually prevent the genocidal impulse.

NG: I understand that hatred is constituted through the repression of love, denial of attachment, and fears of dependency. What will happen if we do come to recognize our state of dependency on the despised other, or our desire of the hated other? Are you saying that hatred can ipso facto form the possibility of love in spite of a history of hatred? That appears to be a very optimistic theory!

NY. Absolutely. In hate, love is never lost. And under the right circumstances it can always be remembered.

This is precisely why I conclude the book with the idea of political friendship. I believe that the politics of hatred can change because the enemy is forever the lost friend. Political friendship calls for peace without any a priori conditions. It means a certain way of coming together with those who are not "one of us."

When Anwar Sadat declared in public that he was willing to visit Jerusalem, he was taking a risk that Egypt might "lose face." He sent out his call for friendship and peace presumably without knowing whether and how Israel would respond. In that particular case, Menachem Begin returned the call by inviting Sadat to Jerusalem; a year later that visit was followed by a peace treaty between Israel and Egypt. Someone must offer friendship, and it cannot be the one who has no power to lose.

You might, of course, ask, what happens if the other refuses the request for friendship.

In this case, one must follow the footsteps of Sadat; the risk must be taken in the face of a possible refusal. It is important to keep in mind that no friendship is devoid of disputes, injury, pain, betrayal, tensions, and hate, but friendship, for the sake of peace, can embrace hatred and indeed diffuse it. This new demarcation of relations gives rise to a radically new discourse of peace. I am not talking about "true peace," "perpetual peace," or "absolute peace." All these terms have only served to sustain war. I truly believe that by forcing ourselves to choose friendship, the unthinkable peace becomes thinkable. The attachment, which was disavowed, becomes possible to reclaim.