IT IS NOT easy to translate the Hebrew word davka. It means something like “despite it all” and “because of”, but with a sense of deliberate precision: I was at home all day, but the delivery man came davka during the half-hour when I was out. It can connote an intent to irritate: my girlfriend knows we disagree about politics, but she always davka brings it up. In 2003 Ariel Sharon, a pugnacious former prime minister, cited a young American explaining the word to friends back home: “Davka means doing or thinking something both in spite of and because of a given situation.”
Curiously, Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, has chosen as his campaign slogan “Davka Netanyahu”. In December Israeli police recommended that Mr Netanyahu be indicted for bribery and breach of trust. The prime minister says the charges are a witch-hunt by lefty prosecutors and journalists. Many supporters of his hawkish Likud party come from religious or working-class backgrounds, and many are Sephardi Jews, descended from immigrants from the Arab world, rather than Ashkenazi Jews, who trace their roots to Europe and are typically richer. Mr Netanyahu’s davka is an invitation to his supporters to stick a finger in the eye of the elite: vote for me not just despite the corruption charges, but because of them.
This populist way of thinking is becoming familiar all over the world. At its heart lies the politics of resentment. Backers of President Donald Trump enthusiastically call themselves “deplorables”, embracing a term Hillary Clinton used to describe some of them. In Britain, Brexit supporters suggest that, in case of a second referendum, the Leave campaign should employ the rallying cry “Tell them again”. Such slogans appeal not to the merits of the cause, but to supporters’ resentment at being a target of condescension.
The great philosopher of resentment was Friedrich Nietzsche, who thought it had a lot to do with Jews. In “On the Genealogy of Morality”, he describes the politics of resentment as a Jewish invention that lies at the core of Judeo-Christian ethics. In pagan morality, according to Nietzsche, the good is synonymous with the excellent and the powerful: rulers and gods are good because they are beautiful and strong. Judaism and Christianity, resentful of pagan rule, inverted this morality. They saw the weak masses as good, whereas precisely (davka!) the strong rulers were evil. This “slave morality”, Nietzsche thought, was behind all of Western civilisation. He detested it.
Nietzsche’s account of morality’s evolution is a fascinating mess with little relationship to historical reality. However, his analysis of resentment was picked up by thinkers like Sigmund Freud and Hannah Arendt, and has become crucial to the understanding of populism and authoritarianism. Still, it is strange that the politics of resentment should be employed davka by Mr Netanyahu, who is an unlikely underdog.
The scion of a renowned Ashkenazi family, Mr Netanyahu grew up in America before returning to Israel to serve in an elite commando unit—a crucial distinction in a society where military service affects social class. He has been a dominant figure in Israeli politics for more than two decades. He and Likud have helped pull Israel’s political centre in a hawkish direction, winning power and all but ending the prospects for a Palestinian state.
The real political outcasts in Israel are surely Likud’s opponents, the remnants of the peace movement. They are the ones who must urge their dwindling band of supporters to continue hoping for the seemingly impossible, davka.
