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Over the years, the cost accounting spirit has emerged as one of the basic patterns of Israeli political culture. From the state's instrumentalizing of the memory of the Holocaust (which found its supreme satiric expression in the outcry of the Israeli functionary, "Haven't the Jewish people suffered enough?" in a skit by the Cameric Five comedy troupe ); the lordly slogan of the senior politician who tells the victims of the Israeli occupation: "If they give, they'll get"; down to the "price tag" euphemism for the pogromist actions of the Jewish Cossacks in the territories - all these phenomena (and numberless others in the political, social and economic spheres ) are characterized by the intentional cynical cheapening of suffering that is concealed behind the headlines and the words, or by its denial through subordination to the exchange-value principle. Whenever the exchange-value principle is applied, the victims of historic horror become a manipulative element in some irrelevant wheeling and dealing, or the current victims are presented as a factor in some fundamentally baseless equation of justice, or they even become a target of repeated duplication in terms of their status as victims.

http://www.haaretz.com/weekend/magazine/blind-to-suffering-1.391274

Blind to suffering
The Shalit deal shows once again how human suffering has become a matter of cost accounting.

By Moshe Zuckermann
Published 21.10.11

The drawing by Eran Wolkowski that appeared on the op-ed page of Haaretz on October 14 sums up trenchantly and precisely one of the principal aspects of the "Gilad Shalit affair." In the drawing, a boy in a t-shirt emblazoned the iconic image of Shalit asks his father, "So why didn't we do it five years ago?" The father, sitting in an armchair in typical Israeli summer leisure wear (his t-shirt also carries the image of the captive soldier ), replies with the authoritative gravitas of someone who is called on to come up with an answer: "Because 1,000 in today's terms is worth half of what it was."

The idiocy of the reply contains a deep truth: the insistence on the Israeli principle of not being a freier - a sucker - combined with some sort of imagined sophistication in accounting laid the foundation for the Israeli attitude toward the entire affair. That is, the exchange value of the declared goal overrides the realization of the goal itself: the soldier's release from captivity. It's not that the underlying logic of the abduction did not determine the purposeful-businesslike management of the episode from the outset. But that predetermined logic is also the basis for the boy's innocent question: If the solution to the problem lies in a price that is known in advance, and there is a genuine desire to resolve the problem, why not pay the price as early as possible in order to avert the torment that the soldier and his family will undergo? The father's imbecilic reply lies not in the realm of self-justification (his "authoritative" character projects the arrogance of a know-it-all adult ) but is anchored completely in the certainty that accompanies financial calculations, namely that it was worth waiting five years because of the inflationary decrease in the value of the "1,000."

The suffering of the abducted soldier and the suffering of his family are unrepresented and not amenable to representation. In the last analysis, an authentic attitude toward the reality of their suffering must remain mute. The famous comment by the German-Jewish thinker Theodor Adorno - that the role of art is to give voice to suffering, because suffering is entitled to representation just as a man being tortured is entitled to cry out - does not delude itself that the representation of suffering is capable of mediating the concrete experience of suffering. The representation "betrays" the reality of the experience because it cannot be the experience itself.

However, whereas art elevates this "betrayal" to the level of a general insight - which enables art, at its height, to say something about the essence of suffering precisely by way of its concrete representation - the conversion of suffering into its exchange value does not even betray the suffering person but simply removes him as such from the consciousness of those who introduce him into the transactional equation.

Suffering itself is subordinated to considerations of profitability; it is they that determine whether to end it, or not. In his question, the boy is still spontaneously preserving the memory of the suffering; he wants to know why there was a refusal to prevent it for such a long time. The father, in his reply, is thrusting the suffering into realms where it can be ignored, by converting the aspiration to end it into calculations about the price of its prevention. The high-handed nature of his "knowing" reply is merely concrete testimony to his alienation from concrete suffering.

One could, of course, argue that exactly the opposite stance characterized the habitual attitude of the majority of the Israeli public toward Gilad Shalit's fate. Many activists came to the aid of the soldier's family in its struggle to bring him home. Quite a few were unwavering in their activity. The polls show that the majority of the public supported the deal. Nevertheless, the boy's nagging question won't go away: So why did it take five years to happen? The answer is as simple as it is unpleasant: for most of the time, it was not the captive soldier's fate that concerned those who could have brought about his release long ago, had they truly wished to, but the exchange value of his release. The public was constantly subjected to lip service "from above" that everything possible was being done to bring the captive home. But the truth is that, if the decision makers had not arrived at the conclusion that a "window of opportunity had opened" and that it was necessary to act quickly in light of "regional developments" before it was too late, the soldier might well have spent many more years in captivity. Concern for his personal fate would have continued to nourish the Israeli public's image of itself as "merciful" and "humane" and to symbolize some sort of "mutual surety" and "responsibility for others," even as the relevant levels of officialdom continued to cast about for a better deal than the one they were offered years ago, the same one that was finally accepted - with the addition of the years of torment and suffering undergone by the soldier and his family.

Exchange value

The cost accounting spirit is by its nature blind to suffering and raises the price of ending suffering to the level of a meta-criterion of the instrumental reason that always drives it. It does not wish to nullify the suffering, but to justify it and its continued existence by converting it into what is presented as its parallel equivalent, which is intended only to cause the suffering itself to be forgotten. Against this, there will be some who argue that this is the nature of politics, which acts as it does because the mechanisms of suffering in the context of which it operates are tangled, violent and repressive, and cannot be overcome by simple, just moderation. As in the song "Wild World," it is known that the jungle dictates its laws according to its nature, the more so because the majority here accept that in the Middle East "Israel has no one to talk to."

In a column on the page opposite the Wolkowski drawing, Yossi Sarid asks "who we should thank" for Gilad Shalit's release. Referring to the proponents of the exchange-value principle and the logic that guides their reasoning, he writes: "Who did not terrify us over the past 36 hours? Here come the released prisoners, here lie our bodies. They will never warn, those admonishing preachers, of a war - somewhere between Tehran and Aswan - that will inflict more casualties. They will never consider peace as an alternative. Our fate is sealed."

That is indeed the case in a nutshell. When we rely on a perception of reality that necessarily and "naturally" creates victims and suffering, the practicalities of the solution to the problems that this context generates are guided by instrumental reason. They will never deal with creating a reality that inherently aspires to prevent victims and suffering - but always with estimating the cost of the supposedly unavoidable suffering and with the profitability of extricating the victim from his plight in the face of a repressive reality whose necessary existence and history of victimizing are never doubted.

Then, suddenly, there issues forth the "leadership" of the person who ideologically and practically shared in the creation of the situation about which he is now called upon to show "leadership capability." And the father, who ostensibly supports the captive's release, explains to his son, from the heights of his false consciousness, why it was impossible to apply five years ago what is today suddenly being acclaimed as an act of "leadership." Only the boy retains innocent wonderment, until he grows up and becomes a father himself and explains to his son why controlling the secrets of cost accounting always overrides the historic possibility of rendering suffering - and, accordingly, its cost-accounting - unnecessary.

Prof. Moshe Zuckermann is on the faculty of the Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas at Tel Aviv University.