Benjamin Netanyahu's gift to Donald Trump (from one settler to another): a gaudy golden pager mounted on a slice of felled ancient olive tree; Feb 6, 2025. Photo: BBC.
By David Lethbridge – Feb 12, 2025
When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was in Washington recently, he presented US President Donald Trump with a golden pager. The pager was attached to a wooden background and inscribed below the pager on a small golden plaque were the words: “To Donald J. Trump our greatest friend and ally.”
What is the meaning of this peculiar gift? It is intended as reference to the deadly operation carried out by Israel in Lebanon on September 17, in which the pagers held by members of Hezbollah would explode and kill them. But the explosions also killed or severely wounded – as the Israelis knew they would – thousands of those who happened merely to be nearby, including many children.
But what kind of person would seek to memorialize and indeed to celebrate the murder and wounding of innocent children and other bystanders and to present such a golden fetish as a gift to another?
Necrophilia is the clinical term for the extremely rare erotic desire to make love to the dead, to have sex with corpses. Psychoanalyst Erich Fromm sought to expand the term more generally to refer to all those who took pleasure – a passionate pleasure – in killing and in death.
Here is an example: a US-trained “Contra” counterinsurgency operative, paid to murder the peasants and workers who supported the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua. He said, “I love killing. I have been killing for the past seven years. There’s nothing I like better. If I could, I’d kill several people a day.”
Here he stands before us then, this agent of US imperialism, nakedly telling us of his love, of his desire. He is passionate, this Romeo of death. And he is holding nothing back. He is not bragging or exaggerating. Quite simply, he is speaking the truth: that at a crucial time in the world’s history he was eager – as eager as a lover – to destroy a people’s hope for liberation and social justice, to drown it in blood, to bring pleasure both to himself and to his paymasters in Washington.
And who now can forget the seemingly endless series of photographs taken at Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad in 2004 in the US war against Iraq? The smiling, laughing faces of US soldiers who had forced naked Iraqi men into human pyramids for their own sadistic pleasure, or who had lined the Iraqi men up and, smirking, had pointed with mock disparagement at the nude genitals of their prisoners?
During the Spanish Civil War, fascist general Millan Astray spoke at the University of Salamanca in the course of which he had cried out “Viva la Muerte!” (Long Live Death!). Philosopher Miguel de Unamuno was in the hall and rose to say, at the risk of his own life, “Just now I heard a necrophilous and senseless cry.” He was the first to use the word in the way we have been here elaborating.
Winston Churchill too was a prime example of a man afflicted with necrophilia. Not only was he entirely favourable to fascism, but he had a curious and necrophilous habit of killing flies and then lining up their tiny insect corpses in neat little rows.
And how many times has the Israeli state, from its president to its settler citizens to its gun wielding forces referred to Palestinians as vermin, as parasites, as insects, as filth, in a necrophilous catalog of the subhuman?
In a certain sense, necrophilia can be seen as the psychological core of fascism. The desire to kill is at the heart of the idea of the master race, or the very similar idea of the chosen people – of the view of the Other as inferior, as vermin, as something to be exterminated. Necrophilia is a structure – a socially and culturally produced structure – that gives rise to a desire to kill.
And hence the golden pager. A fetish from one sociopathic killer to another. Keep in mind that Netanyahu, smiling and grinning and nearly giggling with pleasure throughout his press conference with Trump, has never once shown any remorse or even regret that his genocidal bombing campaign against the Palestinians in Gaza, made possible with US money and munitions, has mutilated and orphaned thousands of children, deprived them so often of not only their fathers and mothers and sisters and brothers, but their legs or their arms. How many children have been operated on without anesthetics, screaming in agony because the Israeli state ensured that no medicine, no anesthetics, would be permitted in their killing zone.
The golden pager is a ceremonial token. It is a reminder of all those who had their hands blown off, their faces burned, their eyes blinded forever, when their devices unexpectedly exploded wounding or killing them and murdering those who were close to them.
In any war there are victims, the wounded and the dead. That is why we must oppose war, all war, and seek to bring the genocidal war criminals before the International Court of Justice.
But the golden pager is a memorial to just how wonderfully clever and how very superior the Israeli state thinks it is as it goes about its necrophilous business eliminating anyone who stands in the way of their plans for endless Zionist expansion.
And yet while Netanyahu and Trump laugh and cheer and toast each other over dinner, exchanging gifts like mob bosses, they forget that the oppressed and the working class everywhere, not least in Palestine, are gathering their strength, organizing and actively engaged in what will be the long struggle that lies ahead. Victory is not guaranteed, but neither is defeat. Together we can yet win.
