(This is not a real post. Just an unlisted rant.)
As they say, talk is cheap. There is a mode of political engagement based around articulating an ideal vision of the future. To my mind, this approach has limited value. And, unfortunately, it is also all too often confused with real politics—particularly in our present virtualised existence.
To stick to a fairly comical example, the strain of small government politics so prevalent in the pre-Trumpian American right was sustained on a diet of impossible promises. It was not a faction based around concrete interests, policies, and outcomes. Rather, talking heads traded fantasies of some anarcho-capitalist prelapsarian ideal, and the whole endeavour took on the same gravity as two pop culture fans at a convention arguing over whether Darth Vader could kill Gandalf or not. For a particularly colourful illustration of the capacity for LARP-eology, please enjoy this 30 second long microcosmic spasm from the 2016 Libertarian Party presidential primary debates:
There is a paradoxical frustration here: this style of politics is exactly rooted in things which cannot matter on account of being for the sake of entirely unachievable goals, and yet the approach reigns so supreme in our recurring political discussions that it cannot help but matter in at least some senses. In a world untethered from reality, government is not a practical institution or a tool, but the brush with which we can paint our dreams onto an illusory canvas. Not an object with material dimensions and consequences, but an ideological construct that operates on the power of imagination.
In this context, the various slogans that delimit the Palestine debates feel like a sort of trap. They improperly frame a conversation that should be understood within the boundaries of the real conditions of real people. Instead, we talk about our imaginary visions and resultantly transfigure the debate into a dispute between and about ourselves. There is a sombering powerlessness to this. Despite their protestations, most people have unconsciously given up on solving the real problem, and so the crisis is reduced to a fetish through which we discuss our own overriding bigotries—antisemitism and Islamophobia.
In order to escape such traps as best as I can, I would like to address the overriding subject from three different perspectives that are normally precluded through such sloganising: Firstly, I wish to explicitly state why I am so overly reticent to casually use any of the slogans and usual jargon of this conflict. Secondly, I would like to address the context of Zionism, and its differences from a conventional colonial struggle. Thirdly, I would like to confront this conversation “between and about ourselves” directly and articulate the sense of moral bankruptcy that I feel to have overtaken this discourse. After using these topics to free ourselves of certain prescribed forms of conversation, I can hopefully articulate my own hopes and position on the conflict without all of the usually necessary equivocation and ambiguity.
One
Beginning with sympathy and solidarity for the weaker party is an excellent first impulse. This is because it aligns with always standing for the oppressed and victimised. This is an inherently necessary part of fighting injustice, because those with power already fight for themselves. For this reason and many others, my foremost allegiance in this conflict is to its victims; primarily in the sense of the ordinary people who did not invite this injustice rather than any specific governments, but in the discussion of respective states my sympathies more or less lie with Palestine. A free Palestine is a moral obligation for an ethical world.
Despite this, I despise using the conventional language of this debate. I almost never use the term Zionism casually, and categorically refuse to refer to any group of Israelis as ‘Zionists’. I also do not typically refer to the occupation of Gaza as a ‘genocide’. Nor will you ever hear me utter calls of “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” For not, I also make a point to not describe Hamas using the inherently propagandistic term of ‘terrorists’. On the whole, these various choices no doubt give off the impression of fence-sitting euphemism. To some degree, I cannot help how people choose to interpret my words. But euphemism is not my intention. Quite the opposite, I reject this sloganising of the conflict precisely because they tend towards figurative, broad language that allows falsehood to lurk within the appearance of truth.
The “from the river to the sea” phrase has become the focal point for this issue. The literal text of the slogan does not necessarily have to mean any one thing. A fairly obtuse reading allows it to include a call for a simple two-state solution if we take it to mean a free Palestine near the river (West Bank) and the sea (Gaza). But practically anyone with any sense recognises that “from the river to the sea” is, under any coherent grammar, a call for a one-state solution in favour of Palestine. This alone is a good reason for me to not use it, since I can only see any practical sense in a two- or three-state solution. However, this does not explain my moral issue with the phrase, and with the use of such slogans to begin with.
Language always involves some level of tension between underexclusivity and overexclusivity. In other words, a dance between wording that is too broad to specify one’s thoughts accurately and wording that is too narrow for functional communication. When one thinks of political propaganda, there are many kinds that are intentionally overexclusive; generally involving the understatement of what the propagandist means by only specifying the most digestible element of the truth. For example, describing the bombing campaign in Gaza as ‘air support’ disguises the probability of civilian death through the use of overexclusive military jargon. However, it is also possible to propagandise through underexclusivity. Political language in a democratic context often exists to obscure differences for the sake of coalition building. This art was refined in the era of popular front political factions. To give a fairly simple example, the phrase ‘reproductive rights’ is utilised to avoid alienating coalition members by specifying particular abortion policies. Instead, it is a broad label used to contrast the coalition next to the opponents of abortion rights. Such obfuscation is a necessary part of coherent political messaging in a democracy, or else every party would be reduced to an infinite number of highly specific factions. But when it comes to an issue as morally weighty as Palestinian liberation, it can be problematic. There is no obvious way to discern between uses of the phrase “from the river to the sea” that mean a secular, multicultural, truly free Palestinian state as compared to fascistic calls for the elimination of Jews from Israel. The language very precisely relies on its ability to obscure this difference for its perpetuation, and allows both kinds of people to march side by side and use the same language.
I find language that obscures differences with theocratic fascists and pan-Arab nationalists to be morally unacceptable. For the same reason, I refuse to use the term Zionist in a manner that can be confused with organisations like Hamas who print and distribute antisemitic propaganda and calls for genocide. I am forced into language that may seem to equivocate not because of a desire to euphemise the conflict, but exactly because I find it necessary to expunge any illusions of an alliance with the unambiguous fascists who have been allowed to form a popular front with the left-wing movement for Palestinian liberation. Since this confusion begins with the use of this broad language, reversing it becomes necessary. And relatedly, I refuse to use the term terrorist, or the various slogans perpetuated by the Israeli government in their own propaganda war in favour of their continued occupation of Gaza and forced settlement of the West Bank.
I understand how these choices invite accusations of centrism. After all, a steadfast commitment to neutral language can inadvertently communicate moral neutrality and indifference. However, I also believe the specific facts of this conflict make this challenging linguistic push-and-pull morally necessary. And to establish why this is, I need to address the realities of this conflict, and to correct some misconceptions that are commonplace in our slogan-filled discourse.
Two
It is possible that this section and the prior one are in the wrong order. After all, I expect that many who are reading this found the substance of my equivocation rather confusing. Sure, it makes sense that I would want to avoid propagandistic euphemism. But on the substance, there is no equivalence between Israel and Palestine, right? So why bother with making the language an issue, except to obscure this underlying moral reality? On the whole, I expect the average reader here feels fairly strongly that Palestine is the victim of Israeli aggression and occupation and colonialism. And in that context, the content of my preceding apologism can only read as excuse-making for a genocidal, imperialist regime.
I would like to meet this implicit accusation fairly directly. And I hope doing so will explain why I have gone with the order for this argument that I have. I strongly believe that a great deal of the conventional wisdom that travels in pro-Palestinian circles is factually lacking. And as a result, much of the problematic consequences of the language issues that we have previously discussed do not register as they otherwise should. Therefore, we need to rectify the falsehoods that often travel in these circles. Basically, I believe that many people only understand the conflict in its broad strokes. And as such, their moral intuitions are far more wrong than they understand exactly because this broad understanding allows them to think within the boundaries of the euphemistic language of the pro-Palestine popular front.
The first question I would like to address is one which I find that many, many people who approach this conflict from a general anticolonial perspective have not properly thought through or understood. And failure to understand this question is to entirely not understand the dispute over Palestine. That question is: what is a Jew? In many countries around the world, the concept of a Jew is a pretty minor concern. The Jews are just one of many ethnicities discussed in the context of European history, and there is no suggestion of any particular reason why their relationship to an issue such as Palestine should be any different to any other ‘European’ ethnicity—except the seemingly unique and inexplicable horrors of the Holocaust. In fact, this is often a lens through which the entire concept of Zionism is misunderstood: After Hitler pathologically singled out the Jews for the Holocaust, European empires allowed the Jews to colonise the Arabic nation of Palestine in compensation for this genocide. Or so the conventional wisdom goes. This story is essentially wrong, and explaining why requires us to properly establish the Jewish perspective on history and life in a way that is likely foreign to many whose primary exposure to them is through the sights of Israel and Palestine.
Jews are not European. This is a deeply important fact. They are a Middle Eastern ethnicity that was forcibly ethnically cleansed and removed from the Middle East by the Babylonians and the Romans—among others. It’s also important to note there is concrete scientific proof of this Jews-as-MIddle-Easterners narrative. The Jewish emigration from the Middle East has been confirmed archaeologically, and DNA tests have been used to confirm their relative ethnic relationship: A Jew living in Poland is almost always more genetically related to a Palestinian Arab than he is to the Polish Europeans around him.
Due to the political context of Rome as a cross-continental empire, Jews in exile did not limit their settlement to just the immediately surrounding area of the Middle East. Many found refuge in Europe in relatively small self-contained enclaves. The ability of these enclaves to remain separate from their surrounding host culture while remaining culturally connected to other Jews is the most crucial single fact for the history that followed.
As the conquest of the former Jewish homelands of Judea and Israel were completed, Jews became one of the largest ethnic minorities without a corresponding state. And even more dramatically, they were soon the largest that did not even have a homeland or region where they were the majority. They were a minority without a home everywhere they went, and were treated as such. To exist as a Jew was to be always unsettled and in tension with the world around you. In the Middle Ages, when this relationship was crystallised and institutionalised, this division was acutely realised on religious lines.
Judaism is not exactly just another monotheism with the usual sectarian tensions next to its children in Christianity and Islam. Judaism is specifically the least mutually compatible with these other two. Judaism makes the explicit claim that Jesus and Muhammed were false prophets, whereas Islam for example recognises Jesus as one of the major prophets, even if they deny his divinity and status as the messiah. And the Christian Bible, when read literally, makes the specific claim that it was the Jews who killed Jesus. This charge of deicide did not just make Jews a peculiar heretic sect in the eyes of many Christians, but the agents of Satan. For Christians, there were no Islamic empires around to reject the teachings of Jesus during his lifetime; for Muslims, the European Christian empires were not the same people that rejected the teachings of Muhammed in Arabia. For both, the Jews were a unique category of wilful sinners due to their contemporaneous involvement in their respective founding myths.
This position intersected with their state of exile to produce a uniquely horrible historical condition. Jews were uniquely treated as outsiders and agents of sin despite their now permanent residence in Christian and Muslim nations. And not just merely outsiders in the sense of a usual cultural minority, but because of their far-flung universality in all of the nations of Europe and the Middle East, they were treated as a parasitic existence and traitors to every community they existed near. From this came the antisemitic stereotype of Jews as “rootless cosmopolitans” who lacked a sense of loyalty to their king and nation. Despite the repeated genocides and pogroms, Jews served an important economic purpose which helped to stem their elimination: Jews were exempt from many religious laws, and so were conscripted to fulfil any sinful occupations that were deemed socially necessary. Most notably, religious prohibitions on interest. From this reality also came the antisemitic trope of the Jew as banker, financier, and conspirator.
This state of affairs was horrific for Jews: their communities were subject to arbitrary violence and a systematic deprivation of rights all across the world. However, this system was stable if unjust. Their oppressors needed them, lacked the technology to eliminate them wholesale, and importantly lacked the will. Antisemitic paranoia drove spasms of violence in response to natural disasters, economic downturns, or even just occasional political disorder. However, the total elimination of an ethnic group—especially one that was widely spread apart and offered no tangible risk to the existing political structure—was too deliberate and pointless an act to be enacted. This all changed with the movement into the modern era.
In the modern era, people no longer saw themselves merely as subjects of a monarch, but as citizens in a state which represented a community of the people—a nation. In this context, the separateness of Jews in both ethnic and cultural terms shifted from a petty inconvenience to something philosophically unacceptable. WIth the ascendency of such ideologies in the 19th century, modern antisemitism was born. The two key tropes of classical antisemitism—the Jew as self-interested banker and the Jew as godless cosmopolitan—were synthesised into a new kind of ideological construction. Antisemitism was no longer a spasmodic religious bigotry, but a conspiracy theory. In both the fiction and the non-fiction of the era, an entire system of thought was developed based on the idea that the world was controlled by a cabal of Jewish bankers. This cabal, it was alleged, controlled all of the world’s governments through their positions in the finance system, and were manipulating these states in order to erode the purity of the nation—the unity of the ethnic people—and usher in a world government for the benefit of this “rootless” and “homeless” tribe.
This was not a fringe belief. It was a mainstreamed ideology that found formal support across the political spectrum and party systems of Europe in particular. The zenith of this system of thought was obvious before even the rise of someone like Adolf Hitler. In the 1890s, the French government covered up a leak in military intelligence by forging evidence that it was committed by an officer of Jewish ancestry named Alfred Dreyfus. Dreyfus was arrested for a decade on false evidence, and a massive proportion of the French public was swept up in believing that a Jewish cabal was undermining their government for the sake of the Germans. It is in this context that Germany allowed itself to be taken over by a nihilistic death cult which made the explicit mass murder of Jews into its sole purpose. This kind of mass paranoia was only possible after a full century of open theorising that everything from the defeat of Napoleon to the revolutions of the middle of the century was the fault of Jews and Jews alone. As the relationship between Jews and non-Jews developed from a classic dynamic of regular bigotry into this vulgar, paranoid ideology which called for their extermination, some Jews started to advocate for what they believed to be the only escape: Zionism.
The theory of Zionism was, in essence, that it was only by finding a permanent place where Jews could coalesce their power as just another ethnic group instead of as this perpetual minority, that the threat of total genocide could be prevented. The root of antisemitism of the modern variety is easily identified with the disconnect between the Jewish existence as universal outsiders and the ideology which saw citizenship and human rights as inherent to patriotic nationhood. Some Jews felt this “Jewish nation” could be achieved anywhere, but the faction that eventually won out believed that this could only have meaning if the Jews “returned home” to the Middle East where they had been forcibly removed from. This desire by Jews—not European designs on Palestine, which was already within their sphere of influence—was the primary driver of the creation of Israel. This is why, prior to Israel’s formal creation, the idea of Zionism led to mass immigration of Jews to British-occupied Palestine:
For the record, I disagree with Zionism and believe it is both stupid and evil in important senses. Stupid because it intensified rather than solving the issue of antisemitism. (This deserves its own essay someday.) And evil because it necessarily involved an imposition on the existing Arabs in Palestine, and a prerequisite to ignoring their lack of consent in this project was viewing them as less than fully human due to their status as colonial subjects. However, it’s important to view this failure in its particular history. And equally importantly, how misrepresenting this history is rooted in its own kind of evil. For all of Israel’s inherent evil, it is not, as it is frequently represented, a colonial settlement by European foreigners on an unrelated nation. It is a return by the world’s largest exiled people, who had been subjected to centuries of genocide, to their homeland, undertaken in the context of colonial ideologies which established a deeply and ironically evil indifference to the other indigenous people who were already in that same homeland.
Three
In this context, it’s really hard to disentangle the suggestion that Israel is a puppet state set up “by Europeans” for vaguely nefarious reasons from conspiracy theories that view Jews as those in control of European imperial states. Therefore, much of the language mixed into narratives of Israel as a settler-colonial project has a certain inescapable ambiguity in relation to the core myths and tropes of antisemitism. For example, the regular calls for Israelis to “return to Brooklyn” or calling Israelis “European” repeats the logic of antisemitism. Specifically, the perception of Jews as rootless cosmopolitans who lack any sense of home or community, and occupy nations according to the whims of their unifying banker cabal (based in New York and London). Let us try our hand at how this works in practical critical analysis of current political rhetoric. Examine the following Tweet:
On its surface, such comments do not present as obviously and outwardly bigoted. It is in the form of a very dovish indictment of violence itself by highlighting the sanctity of the land itself. However, beyond the sheer scientific falsehood of its claim that Israelis are not native to Palestine—almost 90% of Israeli Jews are native-born, contrary to the Brooklynite accusations—that claim takes a structure which cannot be separated from classic antisemitic tropes. It does not indict Israel’s government as cruel, authoritarian, or militaristic. And it does not locate its indifference to Palestinian life and land in such accusations—as, say, one might find in a Western indictment of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, where the Russian army is accused of institutional evil. Rather, Israelis here are said to be carrying out the occupation and destruction of Palestine because they lack a connection to its trees, its buildings, and land: Its blood and soil. This argument is incoherent without the specific belief that Israel is a nation of European occupiers who do not see Palestine as their home.
This whole ideological construction makes for a marked difference as compared to comparable ethnic conflicts of the past: During the Turkish genocide of Armenians, the Armenians were never accused of being rootless cosmopolitans who should go back to Brooklyn. In isolation we might forgive this confusion. After all, there is enough superficial similarity between valid critiques of colonialism and the tropes of antisemitism that we cannot dismiss these critiques out of hand as resulting from bigotry. But the relevant history in the region complicates matters. Hamas does not stay silent on this question, for example: Their official policy, as the government of Gaza, is that the Jews are a rootless banker cabal who control the governments of the world. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and other examples of Nazi-favoured propaganda, are widely distributed in these spaces in Arabic—both online and across the Arabic world in print. The explicit position of such organisations is not that Israel is an exploitative extension of European colonialism, but that the United States and Europe are organs of the Israeli state and the Jewish cabal—Zionist Occupied Governments (ZOG), as they call them. These positions recur again and again in anti-Western organisations who have taken up the fight for Palestinian liberation. From Iran to Hezbollah to Hamas to Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda to ISIS, all of these organisations did not explain their policy of resistance against the West in terms of British colonialism, but in terms of resisting the “Zionist” world conspiracy.
And this problematic overlap occurs again and again in the context of Palestinian resistance. Take, for example, the video of this rally in New York in the aftermath of October 7th:
While much ink has been spilled over the quandary of pro-Palestine supporters who seem to endorse the attacks as inherently good as in the above video, I would like to insead highlight the comments of the finishing speaker:
Thank you all for being here, … to honour our martyrs, and for marching to show those here in the heart of the empire that they will never defeat our struggle. They have failed to break the unity of our people.
This excerpt is so gripping not just because of its ability to be read in the light of antisemitic tropes, but exactly in the chameleon-like way that it is able to embed phrases which can be read in that racist light within the separate tropes of left-wing anti-imperialism. Referring to the United States as an empire is a natural—and accurate—element of left-wing discourse. However, noting that this statement was read from pre-prepared remarks, its language does not quite parse in those terms. For an anticolonial critique of America as an enabler of Israel, the ‘theys’ of the sentences bleed together in a peculiar manner. ‘Those here’ in the ‘heart of the empire’ are being shown that ‘they’ will never defeat ‘our’ struggle or ‘break’ the unity of ‘our’ people. Such comments are made immediately following a sentence that was not discussing American involvement in Israel, but rather the ‘martyrs’ who attacked Israel on its own terms. And where is this ‘heart of the empire’ anyway? This rally was not in Washington D.C., the heart of American foreign policy and imperial government. Rather, it was in New York, America’s financial capital, and a uniquely Jewish city by the standards of American demographics.
The point is not to try to divine the inner bigotry of this particular activist’s mind—I know what I think of someone who could write these counter-intuitive words in this counter-intuitive order in pre-prepared remarks, but that’s neither here nor there. The point is that the erasure of conscious awareness of the history of Zionism and Jewish suffering blinds one to the double meanings of such propaganda. It blurs the lines between left- and right-wing discourses, as accusations against Israel based on its perceived lack of blood and soil, and conspiracy theories rooted in antisemitism, are enmeshed within progressive anticolonial rhetoric. This is so easy to do precisely because antisemitism is not just a racial prejudice, but a conspiracy theory. An antisemite does believe that Palestine is being colonised by American capitalism. Except, not for the benefit of the American empire itself, but the ‘Jewish empire’ of Western financial capital. And so, antisemites are able to disguise themselves in the popular front language of the anti-capitalist left. Once you are sensitive to the fact that there are some antisemites masquerading as left-wingers, you will see them everywhere, since their language is subtly different from authentically progressive advocates.
It is in this light that I endeavour to fight the losing battle of making a categorical distinction between the left as a critique of the ideological force of capitalism and the “left” as an anti-banker conspiracy theory—which is naturally filled to the brim with antisemites. This necessitates unending delineations and equivocations in order to contextualise the fact that, despite the wrongheadedness and maliciousness implicit in the project of Zionism, it is also a response to racism and oppression. And those racist forces are alive and well today.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union in particular, a strange polarisation has overtaken much of the world. As the American empire is widely viewed in terms of its morally promiscuous culture, hedonistic capitalism, cosmopolitan multiculturalism, economic globalism—and yes, Jewishness—a particular kind of ideological response has taken root in many communities. This response takes dominantly the form of moral restrictiveness, communitarian nationalism, ethnic fascism, economic isolationism, and antisemitism. And in their opposition to the capitalism of the American empire, many on the left have made a degree of common cause with these reactionary forces. With the abyssal loss of a materialist critique of capitalism as a historical force, the reaction to capitalism increasingly relies on a vulgar theory of secret banker cabals and subliminal race wars. To quote Marx, “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” Could there be anything more farcical than the degeneration of the left into just one wing of an anti-American reaction that lives on the half-digested leftovers of European fascism?
What I mean to articulate with all of this is that I cannot make any common cause with this reaction. This does not mean changing my conclusions to contrast with such movements—not even slightly. Merely that I will never surrender the moral obligation to make distinctions in my rhetoric and my politics compared to those who represent repressive, reactionary ideology. This is exactly why I cannot abide a manner of talking about Palestine that centres phantasmagorical visions of an idealised future rather than concrete discussions exactly what it is to be done. Do I support a one-state solution in the abstract? Absolutely; any internationalist supports the disintegration of national differences in favour of the common humanity of all. However, at the point where theory meets practice, true understanding of this goal necessarily involves recognising when advocates for a one-state solution do not mean an internationalist settlement but a nationalist one. Rhetoric centred on a Palestinian ‘one-state’—or more accurately, ‘one-nation’—outcome is not a call for internationalism, but a call for the Zionists to ‘go home’. And sensitivity to Jewish history means understanding that when nationalists tell Jews—the one people in the world with no home—to go home, the only place they mean to have them go is to the grave. In this context, Israel must have an immediate right to exist. Not because Zionism was anything but the injustice that it was, but because the reasons for Zionism are exactly why reversing Israel’s existence after it has been established for almost a century is not purely anticolonial, but implicitly genocidal in the same way that eliminating any nation is. And in the same manner, the sovereignty of the Palestinian people against the dehumanising colonial ideologies at play in Israel must be secured. Although far from ideal, the rhetoric of a two-state solution is the only responsible option to disentangle oneself from the reactionary circumstances on the ground.
