ABSTRACT
Certainly, the tendency to view Israel as more than itself-to view it in existential, world-his-
torical and/or messianic (or anti-messianic) terms-is limited neither to either Jews nor to Israe-
lis. Both that tendency and the various ‘apocalyptic stings’ that lie behind it unite Israel’s fiercest
critics with its staunchest allies. What none can abide is the possibility that Israel is simply
another state; that the conflict over Palestine means nothing, and signifies nothing.26 It simply
does harm. To remove those stings might be to recover something of a sense of that harm in
its multiform physical, historical, and affective aspects; to cultivate a fuller measure of com-
passion for those bound up in it, a sense of duty to attend to their voices and needs. ‘The smallest
trace of senseless suffering in the empirical world belies all the identitarian philosophy that
would talk us out of that suffering . . . .Woe speaks: Go’ (Adorno, 1973, p. 203).
