Angelus Novus
Mein Flügel ist zum Schwung bereit
ich kehrte gern zurück
denn blieb’ ich auch lebendige Zeit ich hätte wenig Glück.
— Gerhard Scholem, Gruß vom Angelus
In his Theses on the Philosophy of History, Walter Benjamin refers — via a poem by his friend and Kabbalah scholar Gershom Scholem — to a watercolor by Paul Klee, titled Angelus Novus. Benjamin calls this angel the Angel of History: its face is turned toward the past, its wings are caught in the unstoppable wind blowing from paradise. “This storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. What we call progress is this storm.”
Benjamin wrote these Theses in 1940. That was the year he chose to end his life, after his attempt to flee the Nazis and reach the United States was thwarted by Spanish and French authorities.
It is, of course, a kind of reverse fortune-telling to speculate about what Benjamin might have thought of current Israeli policy in Gaza. Yet if we consider the critical views on Zionism held by his friend Hannah Arendt — who was well acquainted with his work — it is not an overly speculative assumption to suggest that he would have strongly condemned that policy. And the same goes for Arendt.
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Gaza and the Holocaust have recently — especially since October 7, 2023, the day of Hamas’s bloody attack — been continually linked to one another, by both supporters and opponents of the Israeli government’s policy. Supporters argue that Israel not only has every right to retaliate against Hamas’s terrorist assault, in the name of Nie wieder — not merely out of revenge, but also to secure the Israeli state — but also that Hamas must be eradicated root and branch. And in that case, apparently, there is no limit to the means employed or the number of victims, currently estimated at around 60,000 Palestinians.
Opponents point first and foremost to the Nakba: the violent actions by Zionists in 1948, during which hundreds of Palestinian villages and around a hundred Bedouin villages were destroyed, thousands of Palestinians were killed, and over 700,000 were displaced. In the eyes of the opponents of Netanyahu’s government, the Holocaust is being used as an excuse for its war crimes. The West, out of guilt over that Holocaust, looks the other way and fails to intervene. Since those horrific actions by the Zionists, the relationship between Israelis and Palestinians has consisted of a chain of reciprocal violence. The dream of one party is the nightmare of the other.
There is no shortage of articles by historians and other scholars detailing the background of this complex drama, and I will not elaborate on them further in this text. What interests me now, primarily, is the line of argumentation currently unfolding — especially in the (digital) media.
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What strikes me is that in almost all cases, people take sides — either for one party or the other. There is hardly any voice for distance or detachment. That is, in itself, understandable: the atrocities committed by both sides are appalling, and one wants to show no understanding for them. So the only way to deal with this is through denial — of one party or the other. This choice is determined by one’s cultural and political background. The result is that any reasoning about this tragedy is trivialized.
It is evident that the Netherlands carries, or feels, a war guilt toward the Jewish community. Our country has one of the highest percentages of Jews deported to the extermination camps — higher, for example, than that of Germany, the inventor of the Holocaust. The Netherlands created a myth of heroic conduct, in which Jews were protected as much as possible during the years 1940–1945. The reality was far less noble. It is no coincidence that the word hypocrisy gradually gave way to the more euphemistic term gezelligheid — a word the Dutch are proud of. It’s a term that characterizes Dutch culture like no other. The attitude of the Netherlands — both through successive governments and broad segments of the population — has always been uncritically pro-Israel. And this remains the case today in the more conventional and conservative parts of our population — the majority. But that guilt is not absolved by denying or covering up this new, abject catastrophe with the same hypocrisy. And so this catastrophe is misunderstood and concealed behind comfortable fallacies.
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For this reason, I now turn primarily to the supporters of the Israeli operation in Gaza, because this genocidal campaign is still ongoing, and also because of the method being used: starvation. These supporters say: “Genocide hasn’t been proven.” No, from a legal standpoint that is indeed correct. That is also extremely difficult. But numerous legal experts in this field believe that the term ‘genocidal’ is entirely applicable. It is demonstrable.
Supporters also say: “We don’t know if the information about it is reliable, because it might just be based on Hamas propaganda.” Oh, come on. Of course Hamas uses every imaginable form of propaganda it can get its hands on — just as the Israeli government does. But to use that as a reason to do absolutely nothing, and to shed crocodile tears that it’s all “really quite terrible”, is devoid of any moral awareness.
The credibility of institutions like the UN, Doctors Without Borders, Amnesty International, various NGOs (including Israeli ones), and reputable news media is casually and condescendingly cast into doubt. “The UN credible? Haha, don’t make me laugh!” The sheer ignorance with which the integrity of these institutions is questioned reminds me strongly of the drivel of climate deniers, vaccine skeptics, and COVID denialists — all of which ultimately comes down to reducing science to a matter of ‘having an opinion’. Of course, it is always necessary to be critical of any institution or media outlet — mistakes are certainly made — but to use those mistakes as grounds to blow everything up is… well, let’s call a spade a spade: a form of mental genocide.
In any discussion whatsoever, there is no getting through. People are blind to the blatant malice of the Israeli government. They deny the possibility of an underlying strategy aimed at completely expelling the Palestinians from Gaza — or they agree with it. And so, people remain entrenched, clinging to their own positions without criticism. Western leaders, with few exceptions, are hypocritical as well. The most outrageous example came two days ago from British Prime Minister Starmer, who threatened to recognize the Palestinian state if Israel refused to agree to a ceasefire. That is cynicism of the highest order. Either you believe that Palestinians have a right to their own state, or you do not. But to use that as a bargaining chip is not only utterly absurd — it is entirely immoral.
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All these lines of reasoning are textbook examples of what Immanuel Kant called the ‘Second Evil’, and what Hannah Arendt termed the ‘Banality of Evil’. You know it’s wrong, but you stubbornly lean on outdated, worn-out convictions in order to avoid facing that awareness. Hypocrisy — in the Netherlands, we call it gezelligheid.
History repeats itself. We will never learn. The Angel will point us, again and again, and relentlessly, toward our inevitable, disastrous future.
“Not to worry, sleep well.”
[Colijn, 1936.]
— Cornelis de Bondt, 29 July 2025