Carl Schmitt (11 July 1888 – 7 April 1985) is alive and well. Thank you for asking. As a matter of fact, he is walking the streets of Jerusalem nowadays, taking notes that confirm his understanding of politics as the realm in which the friend-foe distinction rules. If he were really alive today, he would notice that his distinction permeates everyday life as a series of racial confrontations. Last week, this culminated in an attempted lynching by a mob of Jewish Israeli teenagers of a few Palestinian youth.

On the Friday night of August the 17^th, four Palestinian young people from East Jerusalem strolled the city center, trying to enjoy its night life, relaxing after a day of Ramadan fasting. They were attacked by the mob shouting racial slogans, beating them, and leaving one of the Palestinians unconscious and seriously wounded. The attack took  place in the open public, viewed passively by hundreds of people. Only a few intervened, saving the lives of the Palestinians. The rest of the crowd feared for their own life, or worse, supported the mob.

The attack is the latest example of escalating racial violence conducted by both sides. In April this year, another mob, fans of the Jerusalem football club Beitar Jerusalem, violently confronted Palestinian workers in a Jerusalem shopping mall. And on November 2010, a group of Jewish students who mistakenly entered the streets of Al-Issawiya, a Jerusalem Palestinian neighborhood, were stoned almost to death, narrowly escaping with the help of the police.

The latest attack aroused a public uproar in Israel. Chief of the Israel Police, Yohanan Danino, acted decisively, denouncing the attack, establishing a special investigating team that soon arrested the suspects, who confessed participating, justifying themselves with a racist agenda. Many of them were seen as teenage drop-outs. Also politicians joined in the denunciations, first among them: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, President Shimon Peres, and the Speaker of Parliament Rubi Rivlinwho visited the wounded Palestinian teenager in the hospital.

It seems that the alarming lessons of what happened in Tel Aviv on May 22th, which I analyzed in my last post, has affected the political system. The political leadership uttered the appropriate words, sincerely. Though, as criticized by Eyal Megged, the form of denunciation was not public enough. Netanyahu should have summoned a special address to the nation, condemning the racial violence, pointing out the moral danger we as a nation face. While I think that Meged’s criticism is sound as far as it goes, I don’t think it goes deep enough.

Indeed, speech can act and words have illocutionary power. And yet, words require certain conditions to be able to act, and even then, they are not enough by themselves. The words of denunciation should be accompanied by amending deeds, and not only police enforcement deeds. And amending deeds are nowhere to be seen, to the contrary.

Take the education system as an example. Following week of the mob attack, the Israel education ministry revealed some alarming data concerning the matriculation success rates in Israel in different municipalities. The matriculation results show a growing gap, the strong leaving the weak way behind. Thus, Arab, Haredi (ultra orthodox Jews), and peripheral municipalities are falling behind, with their youth immersed in structural ignorance and poor prospects in advancing their life plans.

This is specifically true in Jerusalem, with its large percentages of Arab and Haredi populations, and with a matriculation success rate of about 42%, less than half of the strongest municipality. This structural ignorance, the result of a gross failure by the State of Israel to allocate resources equally and supervise core curricula, maintains and fuels racism and creates the breeding ground for the escalation of Schmittian racial violence.

And it is not just the general education in the poor municipalities that has such detrimental effects on the Israeli public and Israeli youth (especially the drop-out youth). The civic and democratic education for engaged and pluralist citizenship has suffered a blow under Minister of Education Gideon Saar, who advances Jewish tradition studies at the expense of civic and democratic education. Moreover, in a very controversial decision, supposedly made autonomously by Minister Saar’s Director General Dalit Stauber, the civic supervisor, Adar Cohen, was dismissed.

While the official grounds for dismissing Mr. Cohen were some professional mistakes, unofficial reports disclose a rightist political crusade against him. The right, apparently, considers Mr. Cohen as not sufficiently Zionist, as advancing a too cosmopolitan, pluralist, and critical agenda. Almost replicating the accusations against Socrates, Mr. Cohen is seen as corrupting the minds of the young. (This decision has been suspended for the time being by Minister Saar following the appeal of Mr. Cohen to the ‎Labor Courts.) Under those conditions, it is no wonder that Israeli youth, suffering from structural ignorance and lack of civic and democratic education, is moving from an engaged pluralism into a Schmittian life of racial violence.

Time and again, we have turned to Jerusalem as a source of Western morality, “A Light Unto the Nations.” I grew up in a Jerusalem, thriving with such a potential. I work in such a Jerusalem university, and I believe in her ability to be such a moral light. But as long as Schmitt inhabits her streets, I see no chance of making this dream a reality.

History is a reservoir of teachings. For example, fusing together xenophobia, social unrest, racial stereotyping and sexual hysteria is especially explosive, endangering the marginalized others, the social fabric, and the political system as a whole. Looking at the rise of the xenophobic right in Europe,  it sometimes seems that many Europeans have forgotten the lessons they so painfully learned. I fear that Israel, on the other hand, has not learned those fundamental teachings at all.

In the last couple of years Israel faced a steady inflow of Africans, smuggled in through its borders. Their numbers are hard to know accurately, but the estimation is in the tens of thousands. Most of them are from Eritrea and Sudan; countries torn by wars and hunger. Many of them are asylum-seekers, who apply for refugee status. But the state authorities mostly refuse to examine their requests, as is required by the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees (1951), of which Israel is party. On the other hand, they are not deported, and thus remain in a purgatory state in which they are legally banned from work, do not enjoy any social rights, and are pushed into lives of misery and poverty at the margins of society.

Hardly any asylum-seeker is granted the status of a refugee because Israel fails to fulfill its legal responsibility to examine their requests. Hence, they remain as asylum-seekers and are perceived as illegal immigrants. Many of them are crowded in the streets of southern Tel Aviv alongside poor sectors of Israeli society, sectors that themselves suffer from marginalization, alienation, and a host of economic and social problems. Seeing their streets crowded by foreigners, who allegedly steal their jobs and affect their standards of living, alienates those sectors further and flairs their anger at the government. Nothing new in the stratification of racial hate, unfortunately.

Recent weeks have witnessed a worsening of this explosive situation. Some asylum-seekers are reported to be involved in property crimes. Driven to hunger, they seize whatever survival method they possess, including theft. Worse, during May, two gang rapes of Israeli young women by asylum-seekers took place, very cruel and violent ones. And these rapes broke whatever restraints Israel society had. Racial and hate discourse erupted, and with it, violence against the asylum-seekers and those individuals and civil society organizations that help them. Molotov cocktails were thrown at apartments of asylum-seekers, violent attacks were directed at them, and a violent demonstration took place in southern Tel Aviv on May 22^nd.

The racial dynamic took an even uglier turn. Politicians rode on the racial wave and participated in the hate discourse. Some of them participated in the demonstration, leading the hate speech that resulted in more violence, lynch-like. Members of Parliament Miri Regev (Likud), Danny Danon (Likud), and Michael Ben-Ari (Eretz Yisrael Shelanu), participated. Regev called the asylum-seekers a “cancer,” and the others blamed them, and those who stand by their rights, as a threat to the national identity of the state of Israel. Ben-Ari accused asylum – seekers of spreading diseases and terrorism. And it is not only back-benchers who participate in this hate carnival. Minister of Interior, Eli Yishai (Shas) has been leading this campaign for a long time, demanding the deportation of all asylum-seekers. Yishai is the minister who is responsible for forming the non-existent policy towards them. Politicians, so it seems, identified the populist wave and decided to ride it to divert the blame for their failure to form a policy, hoping further to gain popularity by being responsive to the plight of society. Rather than restraining public discourse, these politicians decided to ride the dragon spewing hatred.

Well, there is nothing unique to Israel in populist politicians either. But Israel’s history is weaved with that of the Jewish people (and hence also Israel’s special role in the making of the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees). That should have made the Israeli authorities more sensitive and responsive to the call of refugees and to the dangers of racial hate speech. Yet, these sensitivities were silenced by the xenophobic hysteria that came to dominate public discourse, a public discourse which has been filled with adjectives echoing a long tragic past, resembling other racial hate discourses. If one would only change the nouns from Africans to Jews, one could easily be reminded of racial propaganda directed toward Jews, resulting in the worst atrocity in human history. From words to deeds: no wonder violence against asylum-seekers has erupted so forcefully.

Following the violent events of May 22^nd, the political leadership at long last woke up and started to speak up against racism, violence and those politicians who participated in the carnival. President Shimon Peres condemned them, and he was soon to be followed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the Speaker of Parliament Rubi Rivlin, and many others (mute until then). May 22^nd might well be a positive turning point to a more responsible Israeli leadership and more sober and sane Israeli public discussion about the question of asylum – seekers. Yet, it might prove as another stepping stone in unearthing a history that ought to remain a warning signal, not a road map. History is a reservoir of teachings. But the lessons must be learned and re-learned.