It is common knowledge that until now the only serious opposition to Netanyahu’s government in Israel has been the Mossad and Shin Bet secret services. Netanyahu now decided to finally bring them under his control, so he nominated Roman Goffman, an IDF colonel known for brutally oppressing Palestinians in the West Bank, a man with no intelligence experience who doesn’t even speak English, to be the head of the Mossad.
I was understandably surprised to learn that my writing provided the intellectual basis for his action:
“Goffman has repeatedly been accused of misleading his superiors and acting without authority. As an IDF colonel in the occupied West Bank, he directed Palestinian agents in unsanctioned, arbitrary activities. And he firmly believes he has the right to act without regard to the rules. During his military studies, Goffman wrote that a commander must sometimes act even without formal authority, exceeding his mandate to fulfill the presumed will of decision makers—even when that will is not expressly defined.
He claimed that he found the intellectual basis for this approach in the works of Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, a neo-Marxist philosopher and author known for peppering his numerous books, articles and speeches with obscene jokes and politically incorrect provocations. In Goffman’s interpretation, the military commander operates within a “discursive space,” finding an external “fulcrum” outside of himself and the system and acting accordingly—in other words, outside the given framework.”
I didn’t have to wait long for malicious reactions. Jörg Lau (who attacked me as a pro-terror theorist back in 2003) wrote: “Stunning – the next head of the Mossad draws inspiration from — yes, you guessed it — Slavoj Žižek!” There’s also Scott Long: “New Mossad chief says he finds his ‘intellectual foundation’ in Slavoj Žižek. TRAITOR, THAT PLACE RIGHTfully BELONGS TO ME.”
For my part, I’m not sure how to take Goffman’s reference to me — seriously, jokingly, ironically (“I’m using the very theorist known as a supporter of the Palestinians”)? So I will take it literally, in all my naivety.
It is obvious that Goffman is trying to justify the way the IDF and the settlers systematically break (Israeli!) law in order to oppress the Palestinians – so it is not those who resist the Israeli occupation who are breaking the imposed Israeli law, but the Israeli state authorities themselves are breaking their own laws.
Goffman is thus the military counterpart of Danielle Weiss, the “godmother” of settlers in the West Bank, who has been organizing the occupation of Palestinian land for decades. When she explains the settlement expansion strategy in an interview with Louis Theroux, her description of the settlers’ relationship to the Israeli government cannot help but strike us as the pure and simple truth:
“We do for governments what they can’t do for themselves. Even if you take Netanyahu now, who is very happy with what we’re doing here, and with our plans to build a Jewish community in Gaza. He’s happy with it, but he can’t say that. He’s saying the opposite. He’s saying it’s not realistic. Good! We’re going to make it realistic. It’s not forcing the government. It’s helping the government. That’s the first step in politics. You don’t force the government. You give it the ability, the courage, the public support, the political support.”
The key here is the duplicity between the civil movement (settlers) and the official public policy of state authorities – the civil movement does what the state officially denies wanting and even condemns, and thus gradually creates the conditions for the state to accept what has already become a fact.
Goffman admits that the state is now doing the same – the masks of law and order are falling – “an external ‘fulcrum’ outside itself and the system” is the ethnic cleansing of Gaza and the West Bank. This is now the reality of Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East… That’s why Netanyahu has to ensure that the Mossad and the Shin Bet are under his control – a completely different message is often heard from the Israeli secret services.
Efraim Halevi, the former head of the Mossad, said immediately after October 7:
“We don’t have the luxury of waiting. We have to have a viable policy that deals with the presence of Jews and Palestinians in this space. And we are doomed to live together. I don’t want to say we are doomed to die together. And if our approach is that we are doomed to live together, we can’t simply live together with one side having the upper hand and ignoring the aspirations of the other side. There has to be a beginning of rapprochement.”
Ami Ayalon, former Shin Bet leader, said something very similar on January 14, 2023: “We Israelis will only have security when they, the Palestinians, have hope. That’s the equation.”
Israel will not have security until the Palestinians get their own state, and the Israeli authorities should release Marwan Barghouti, the imprisoned leader of the second intifada, to lead negotiations for its creation:
“Look at the Palestinian polls. He is the only leader who can lead the Palestinians to a state alongside Israel. First of all because he believes in the concept of two states, and secondly because he gained his legitimacy by sitting in our prisons.”
It is a choice, the only real choice – some form of coexistence of Jews and Palestinians with full mutual recognition or genocidal war. And, as Yuval Noah Harari clearly pointed out, following the other path means nothing less than the symbolic suicide of the Jews, the renunciation of their historical heritage:
“Judaism has survived, it has become a world champion in surviving disasters. But it has never faced a disaster like the one we are facing now, which is a spiritual disaster for Judaism itself. The worst-case scenario we are facing right now – and can still be prevented – is the possibility of a campaign of ethnic cleansing in Gaza and the West Bank that would result in the expulsion of two million, perhaps more, Palestinians.”
After that, the establishment of Greater Israel, the collapse of Israeli democracy and the creation of a new Israel based on the ideology of Jewish supremacy. The worship of values that for the last two millennia have been completely anti-Jewish.”
Of course, there are honorable defenders of authentic Jewish heritage, among them Major General Yifat Tomer-Yerusha(l)mi, the chief lawyer of the Israeli army, charged with enforcing the rule of law within the country’s armed forces.
In November 2025, she was arrested as part of a criminal investigation into the leaking of a video showing the abuse, including sexual torture, of Palestinian detainees at Israel’s notorious Sde Teiman military prison. Tomer-Jerusha(l)mi was exposed to enormous pressure and even attempted suicide. She wrote:
“There are things that must not be done against even the worst detainees. Officers of the (legal) unit were subjected to repeated personal attacks, severe insults and even actual threats. All because they were upholding the rule of law in the IDF – along with and alongside the commanders.”
The last vestiges of dignity are being erased from public life in Israel, the country where Itamar Ben Gvir, the minister who controls security in the West Bank, a racist and a criminal, has been convicted by an Israeli court. Today, his shadow hovers over the terror that Palestinians in the West Bank are exposed to every day, and Goffman follows his line.
In today’s Israel, one can be punished for following the existing law, so Goffman is not in danger. However, the question remains: why me? Why did Goffman choose me?
The first thing to note is that Goffman’s appropriation of my theory is not an exception. Even more than a decade ago, in order to conceptualize the urban warfare of the Israel Defense Forces against the Palestinians, the IDF military academies systematically refer to Deleuze and Guattari, especially the book “A Thousand Plateaus”, using it as “operational theory” – the keywords used are “formless adversarial entities”, “fractal maneuver”, “speed versus rhythms”, “Wahhabi war machine”, “postmodern anarchists”, “nomadic terrorists”.
One of the key distinctions they rely on is that between “smooth” and “stretched” space, which reflect the organizational concepts of “war machine” and “state apparatus.” The IDF today often uses the term “flatten the space” when it wants to talk about an operation in space as if there were no borders. Palestinian areas are seen as “striped”, in the sense that they are enclosed by fences, walls, trenches, checkpoints and the like:
“The attack carried out by IDF units on the city of Nablus in April 2002 was described by its commander, Brigadier General Aviv Kohavi, as ‘inverse geometry,’ which he explained as ‘reorganizing the urban syntax through a series of micro-tactical actions.’ maneuvered in the city, they were so ‘saturated’ with the urban fabric that very few of them could be seen from the air.
Furthermore, they did not use city streets, roads, passageways or courtyards, nor external doors, internal staircases and windows, but moved horizontally through walls and vertically through openings cut in ceilings and floors. This form of movement, described by the military as ‘infestation’, seeks to redefine the interior as exterior, and domestic interiors as passageways. The IDF’s strategy of ‘walking through walls’ implies understanding the city not only as a place, but also as the very medium of warfare – a ‘flexible, almost liquid medium that is constantly contingent and changing’.
Among the examples closer to us, we should definitely mention the way in which Peter Thiel, the ideologist of digital neo-feudalism, appropriated Rene Girard (US Vice President Vance was also Girard’s student), as well as, of course, the ubiquity among the new right-wing populists of references to Antonio Gramsci (the theme of ideological hegemony and the characterization of our time as a time of “morbid phenomena” that occur when the old dies and the new is not yet born).
In all these cases we can easily see how such appropriation falsifies its source, using only the parts in a way that obscures the whole. Thiel takes from Girard only his idea of mimetic desire, completely ignoring Girard’s idea of Christ’s death as the sacrifice of the innocent that interrupts the very logic of sacrifice – although he presents himself as a defender of Christianity, he is one of today’s great antichrist figures, just like Trump and Vance in their ridiculous polemics against the Pope.
However, this is not the whole truth – it must also be admitted that Trump’s populists fought for ideological hegemony much more effectively than today’s left.
And my case? Is there anything in my theory that lends itself to Goffman’s appropriation? Unequivocally no – what Goffman presents as my position are certain moments of my critical presentation of the way in which an openly cynical ideology functions today, i.e. the way in which the state power increasingly violates its own legal order and mobilizes illegal violence in order to reproduce itself.
It is hard not to see the supreme irony of such a situation – the oppressors use a critical theory of themselves to perfect their criminal activities. That’s why, as I wrote in my last article on the publishing platform Substack, “law and order” is not only a watchword that serves to oppress minorities, but can also function as a watchword for their protection.
The case of Goffman (and the general trend of what is happening in the West Bank) represents the worst possible situation – the victims are not only oppressed by the legal order imposed on them by the colonizers; on top of that, they are exposed to the illegal violence of the colonizers who break their own laws. They have no legal protection against this illegal violence because the state government not only turns a blind eye to it, but directly supports it.
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