It turns out that Dara Horn was overly generous in her concession that ‘People Love Dead Jews.’ The massacre, rape and kidnapping of Israelis—Jews, Arabs, Druze, Asian guest workers—has been lauded, nay touted, on the campuses and streets of every Western city as what Gilbert Achcar in his little book praises as a righteous ‘counter-offensive’ in response to a ‘protracted Nakba of territorial dispossession, ethnic cleansing and apartheid.’
Achcar, a Lebanese Arab militant of the Trotskyoid Left and professor at the SOAS is pitching his appeal to the true believers and the wilfully credulous. It’s less an analysis than a Third-Worldist catechism. No lazy cliché is left unused: genocide, settler-colonialism, apartheid, war crimes, open-air prisons, the emblematic rebellion of the Global South. Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, he writes, was ‘seized’ upon by an ever-eager Israel as a pretext to launch its ‘murderous onslaught.’ And, no equivocating condemnation of ‘disproportionality’ will do for Achcar, as this might concede some begrudging level of legitimacy to a different military Israeli response. Achcar diets on raw meat. For it’s not how Israel responds that Achcar objects to, but that Israel responds at all. Hamas’s noble crusade is, after all, nothing less, in Achcar’s perfervid imagination, than the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Revolt redux, so no justification for its suppression is morally conceivable.
This claim, Achcar insists, is no Holocaust inversion. How dare Western and Zionists supremacists arrogantly associate this uprising-of-the-oppressed with Nazism? Didn’t the iconic Franz Fanon celebrate, elaborate and justify the appropriation of the violence inflicted against the vanquished to ‘swarm into the forbidden cities. To blow the colonial world to smithereens …’?
It cannot be denied that the complex psychological and cultural responses justifying retributive violence—for the alleged cleansing virtues of atrocity—may indeed be the dreams of the marginalised. But the fantasies of the oppressed are as often to circumvent a reckoning with reality. In this case, Israel’s reality. More pertinently, there can be fascist dreams and revanchist dreams as much as there can be democratic socialist dreams. For fascists also wallow in their own unshakeable sense of victimhood, which similarly self-licenses their ‘entitlement’ to barbarism.
The reactionary character of Hamas on women, minorities, gays, Jews, religion and democracy could not be more evident. It is riven with racism and religious obscurantism. Islam is a political religion, as Achcar himself once pointed out. And those who choose to fight under that umbrella choose the banner of reaction and are eventually compelled to act in accordance with its reactionary ends.
Fred Halliday rightfully noted that the ‘Islamist programme, ideology and record are diametrically opposed to the Left—that is, the Left that has existed on the principles founded on and descended from classical socialism, the Enlightenment, the values of the revolutions of 1798 and 1848, and generations of experience. The modern embodiments of this Left have no need of the ‘false consciousness’ that drives so many so-called leftists into the arms of jihadists.’
Still, it might be argued, and Achcar by implication operates as if he’s acting under this assumption, that the oppressed have a right to fight under any banner. Didn’t socialists and democrats ‘support’ Abyssinia (Ethiopia) against the Italian invasion of 1935-7, despite a resistance foully led by slave owners? This slave-holding resistance never, however, elicited the unbridled adulation conferred by the liberal and socialist left upon Hamas.
But this concedes too much. Hamas invaded Israel under very weight of its own intolerant Pan-Islamist program. Shouldn’t the proposition therefore be inverted? Does Israel have the right to resist even under the most reactionary, democracy-averse leadership it has ever experienced? Can socialists and liberals support the war, without endorsing the political and social values of Israel’s governing circles?
But these questions are inconceivable for Achcar. Israel’s presence itself is an ongoing invasion. For him, the core of Palestinian oppression resides in the intolerable existence of a settler-colonialist Zionist state from which all other alleged crimes arise. There is no point in taking on all the spurious, hackneyed allegations against Israel. Suffice it to observe, that if the alleged apartheid, genocide, racism, ethnic cleansing, etc., are objectionable in the .2 per cent of the Middle East that Israel comprises, they are indisputably and immeasurably worse in the other 99.8 per cent of the Middle East, where the minority experience of being an unmolested equal among equals is utterly unknown. Little of which raises more than an episodic peep from the anti-imperialist Left.
Why? Because Israel’s very existence is an affront to the blood and soil nationalism of the Palestinian resistance. And from that platform every act of terror against Israel has axiomatically already been ‘provoked’ and every aggression is a ‘counter-offensive.’ Its remedy, as chanted throughout the West is as chemically pure an expression of Reaction as one could ever find: to literally unwind time. ‘We don’t want 2 states, we want 48.’
With this, the Nakba has long taken its place in a list of ‘noble’ lost causes: the American South after the Civil War; France in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War; and Germany following World War I. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, author of The Culture of Defeat, documents the archetypical course of managing this unwanted reality through mythmaking, aligning defeat with the tragic heroism and imagined grandeur of the past, culminating in the embrace of the revanche. The American South in-defeat wallowed in this for a century and generated a host of reactionary historians, politicians, hooded guerilla terrorists and cultural institutions that dominated and undermined America’s understanding of itself and obstructed its reckoning with racism. It took a protracted Civil Rights revolution paid in blood to break the grip wielded by American South over American politics to complete the Civil War and begin again the process of racial reconciliation.
This same cultural phenomenon has all but swallowed whole the international Left. Perhaps this betrays a genetic susceptibility for championing reactionary lost causes, as witnessed by the Left’s varying loyalties to the Soviet Union long after the promise of the Bolshevik revolution had vanished and turned into its antithesis.
History is a process of disenchantment; ennobling lost causes invariably one of re-enchantment. Like the champions of the American South, all alternative histories must have germs of plausibility. The imperialist powers did carve the Arab nations out of the desert with little attention to economic viability, the desires of the people and diverse religious, ethnic and communal /national aspirations. That’s the germ. But add ‘and then the capitalist powers launched Israel to police the entire framework’ and you have stacked massive crackpot conspiracy atop an anti-imperialist fact. The entangling of fact and fiction gives birth to endless iterations on a theme: first is the original sin of settler colonialism, then the myth of Zionist collusion with Western powers to occupy Palestine against the will and interests of its indigenous population, and lastly the devil’s bargain by Zionism to be an outpost for capitalist imperialism as repayment until the Zionist tool of Western imperialism morphed into its master. It’s the method, as Lucy Dawidowicz stated, by the ‘predators of history, who plunder the historical storehouse for just those “facts” which fit their political needs.’
And these elements germinate into a variety of secondary noxious nostrums where fiction eases out fact: a denial of Jewish indigeneity; the revival of the Khazar myth; the fantasy of a verdant pre-Zionist Palestine of Arab-Jewish brotherhood; explaining the Nakba as a premeditated land grab (Plan Dalet); the supposed collusion of Zionism with Nazism, then with Jordan; the puppet-master power of Zionism that casts its shadow across the world; the demonisation of the cultural achievements of Israel as tools of conquest: whitewashing, greenwashing and pinkwashing; Jews as a ‘class’ of white supremacists, organ thefts from corpses, no less; the ‘racist’ refusal of the IDF to employ rape as a weapon of war.… There’s hardly a liberal journal or publishing house that fails to entertain voices that give purchase to these trends; scarcely a Middle East studies department that hasn’t fallen deep into this black hole.
Blood and soil nationalism has always viewed Jews as unwanted, undigestible trespassers, interlopers and polluters of the national vitality. Jews have constantly been regarded in these circles as ‘settler-colonialists’ in deed, if not in word. The Nazi revolution itself proclaimed that ‘it will prevent the Jewish people from intruding themselves among all other nations as elements of internal disruption, under the mask of honest-world citizens and thus gaining power over these nations.’ Substitute anti-imperialist Left for Nazis and Zionists for Jews and you have the exclusionary world-view of the Palestine solidarity movement.
It is the demand of that movement to extrude Zionists—i.e., Jews who believe Israel should exist—from any progressive movement, whether working on climate change, health care, voting rights, feminist and gay issues and trade union politics. It’s the spirit under which participants in academic and scientific conferences held in Israel imperil their careers for supposed collaboration with racism and occupation, as are judged all artistic, academic and scientific exchanges with Israel. It is the ploy for routinely refusing study-abroad opportunities and withholding academic referrals needed for students to study in Israel.
It is the demand for a worldwide purge of Jews who betray even a hint of affinity for the Israeli national community.
After page upon page of Hamas apologia, of nationalist clichés, and Israeli demonisation, Achcar takes an unseen turn. As the war drags on—and these essays unroll in real time–he laments ‘there is today a lot of religious-inspired maximalism in the Palestinian struggle, as there was yesterday nationalist-inspired maximalism, but hardly any realistic assessment of the conditions in designing a strategy.’ He concedes that a ‘“popular war” for the liberation of the whole of historical Palestine does not make sense, because Israelis are the overwhelming majority in the pre-1967 territory. This is not like an occupying army, whether the US in Vietnam or Afghanistan, or Israel in Lebanon.’ What would be in the interests of the Palestinian people? Not a two-state solution, because ‘the so-called independent state in the West Bank and Gaza does not make sense.’ What would make sense, he avers, might be the reunification of the West Bank with Jordan, though where this leaves Gaza is unaddressed.
To be sure, Achcar never abandons the aim of defeating the ‘Zionist state.’ But he recognises the futility of defeating it by military means. And in the end, he concludes that this can only be attained by actively engaging with those in Israeli society ‘actively opposing the bellicose policies of the Israeli government and fighting for a lasting settlement based on justice, self-determination and an end to all kinds of discrimination.’
What a joint internationalist struggle for self-determination to deprive Jews of the right to self-determination means is anyone’s guess. But I suppose, in some bizarre way, a turn towards peaceful struggle is a sort of Pilgrim’s progress.
