In this Fathom long read, in the wake of the return of Shani Louk’s body to Israel, Deputy Editor Jack Omer-Jackaman re-reads Jean Améry on left anti-Zionism. He surveys the celebratory responses to the 7 October pogrom from much of the radical left, and finds ‘a movement and a caste of mind that have lost even the barest connection to the elementary decency which is the basis of any properly left politics.’
Kronstadt
Every radical generation has its Kronstadt, said the American sociologist Daniel Bell – has, in other words, that revelatory moment when, at least for some, the intellectual evasions and moral contortions of the party line become both unavoidable and untenable. Bell was old enough that his Kronstadt was Kronstadt. For others, the Moscow Trials, Molotov-Ribbentrop, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland etc. etc. did the trick. Plenty more refused to acknowledge a Kronstadt moment and went to their graves refusing to concede that there was so much as a flaw, let alone evil, in the great liberation.
My own Kronstadt – from an era when the Soviet god that failed had been replaced with a new deity in the form of decolonisation – was less an event than an idea, or rather the exposure of a dogma posing as an idea. I remember it with crystal clarity: the moment I read Judith Butler’s demand that we understand ‘Hamas/Hezbollah as social movements that are progressive, that are on the left, that are part of a global left.’
I knew two things at that moment. First, that decolonisation and the campaigns for global justice had not themselves been delegitimised by such insanity, any more than the horrors of the Soviet Union had delegitimised socialism. Second, that while, like Jean Améry, I would be always of the left, I could henceforth play no part in any left that agreed with Butler, and that the rest of my life would in some way be spent engaged in an acrimonious dialogue with it.[1]
Any more I have to give, from here on out will, in large part, be devoted to ensuring that the ‘this is what liberation looks like’ response to 7 October becomes this generation’s Kronstadt.
***
With grotesquely appropriate timing, I was in dialogue with the great Jean Améry – albeit from beyond the veil – when the news broke of the discovery of Shani Louk’s body in one of Gaza’s byzantine networks of tunnels. Améry and I had been reflecting on the roots of the moral degeneracy of the anti-Zionist left, via Marlene Gallner’s superb 2022 Améry compendium Essays on Antisemitism, Anti-Zionism, and the Left.
Despite the plethora of writing over the last eight months bemoaning this left’s many embraces of pseudo-revolutionary murder – much of it very good – I have turned to Améry more than to anyone else in that time. This, despite the fact that the great man took his own life in a Salzburg apartment in 1978. The most recent of the essays is from that same year, but Améry saw it all coming, and with greater insight and clarity than those who have actually lived through the last 45 years. Saw, as Alvin Rosenfeld puts it in the collection’s introduction, that ‘the future of the Left, indeed its very existence, [were] endangered by two developments of the late 1960s: the trend… of ally[ing] itself with fringe groups that were prone to violence, and its fixation on dialectics and social theory as absolutes.’
Améry did not live to see the move from the fringe to centre-stage, and the fixation mutate to an obsession: for his sake, I am rather glad of that, though the rest of us have lost much by his absence. Shani Louk, we have known since late last year, did not live much beyond Hamas’s 7 October siege on the Nova music festival; was likely not alive, in fact, when Ali Mahmud’s camera captured, for eternity, her inert, semi-clothed body on the back of a Hamas jeep. Her family – who have acted with a superhuman level of grace and dignity throughout – were informed in late November that a fragment of Louk’s skull had been found, from a portion of the cranium, damage to which makes survival impossible. For six months which must have been interminable they have been denied the certainty of her body.
The degradations to which Louk has been subjected post-mortem pale next to the cardinal sin of the snuffing out of her brutally attenuated and by all accounts vital and gentle life. They are nonetheless profound.
Mahmud’s obscenely intrusive camera first denied her the privacy in death to which all deceased are entitled (so too, it surely multiplied the agonies for her family). The opportunity afforded Mahmud for such an ‘iconic’, prize-winning, and presumably lucrative image was provided by the two Hamas gangsters who shared the exposed back of a Jeep with her corpse on the journey back to Gaza – one bastard clutching one of her dreadlocks as a ghoulish trophy, the other holding a grenade launcher, with his boot on her back in the most egregious display of human contempt I think I have ever seen.[2]
So much for the degradation of Shani’s person. The degradation of her memory began almost immediately that image went viral, and in the western context almost exclusively from the ‘left’, whose cherished theories either refused to allow that any tragedy was attendant to her murder, or that in fact it was all rather wonderful.
What Améry saw
Since I am sometimes guilty of diluting outrage with irony, let us be crystal clear about what happened, what is still happening. Many on the left excused or else openly celebrated something akin to an einsatzgruppen aktion.
Yes, the left – my home; Améry’s home; by all accounts Louk’s home; and that part of the political spectrum on which, as the Viennese critic Alfred Polgar had it, ‘the heart of humanity beats’. Let not their high-minded post-colonial rhetoric cloak the ugly reality: they exalted at mass murder and rape.
This is why my being with Améry on receipt of the news was so appallingly apt,[3] and why he and Shani will, I believe, remain synonymous for me from here on. For Améry always maintained, though at his time of writing he admitted he could not prove it, that the anti-Zionist left was at best complacent and at worst enthusiastic about the prospect of a second Jewish genocide. The reaction of much of the far or anti-Zionist left to the events of the Black Shabbat would have removed all doubt from Améry’s mind. ‘Where barbarism begins, even existential commitments must end,’ he wrote elsewhere: not a bad credo for left-wing solidarity with armed resistance. But no, no Jean: for the anti-Zionist, where barbarism begins, then the fun can start.
That the far left’s dishonour is not especially new is attested to by Améry’s preoccupation with it in the years before his suicide. Already in 1969 Améry was noting that the anti-Zionist obsession was not merely coterminous with, but essential to, the ‘New Left’ Weltanschauung. What ‘in the past … was considered the socialism of fools’, he wrote, was by then ‘evolving into an integrative constituent of socialism per se, and the socialists of their own free volition, are universally turning themselves into fools.’ (It took the extraordinary David Nirenberg and his book Anti-Judaism to illustrate that there were actually very few aspects of western civilisation to which antisemitism was not an ‘integrative constituent’.)
That things have developed, and that what is now full gangrene was in Améry’s time a well-set but not complete poisoning of the body politic, Améry himself makes clear from beyond the grave. Reflecting on the left’s shift from an anti-fascist to a supposedly anti-colonial focus, he wrote in 1976 that ‘only a moment ago, it seemed natural to support the Israelis right to their own state. Suddenly one is struck by the fact that this support has become a veritable test of courage. Indeed, tomorrow it might well be considered positively offensive.’ That tomorrow is now well past, Jean, and offensive it is to a substantial, vocal, and influential body of leftist thought.
A left which would excuse fascists
Much has already been written about the left’s 2023 autumnal disgrace, but so profound was it – so profound is it still – that there can be no such thing as over-saturation. It is a treason which I cannot and will not forget, and if I am a little late in calling attention to it, it is because for some of us the road between heartbreak and coherence is a little longer than for others.
That it was a treason of the intellectuals is, as the French philosophe Julien Benda knew, all the worse. Nor did it appear from a cold blue sky, and so too does it have impact far beyond the shores of Israel and the Palestinian Territories. For the second time in three years, the far left was faced with an unimpeachably fascist enemy. On both occasions, much of it has chosen the side of the fascists.
The response of the anti-Zionist left to Russia’s attempted amputation of Ukraine has been, in some respects, worse even than their response to 7 October, while sharing a similar taste for despotic strongmen. It is not every generation of leftists that is faced with so clear and unequivocal a case of reactionary aggression. Orwell’s generation faced it repeatedly: then, too, many lacked his fortitude in being able to look it squarely in the face. As good and brave liberal-left writers like Timothy Snyder, Timothy Garton-Ash, and Paul Mason have repeatedly warned us, the same cohort which celebrated or otherwise excused the Hamas pogrom would also sacrifice the valiant people of Ukraine on the altar of a banal, vapid anti-Westernism which holds that anything which purports to be ‘anti-imperialist’ is virtuous.
They are also, of course, largely the same people who served as Assad’s useful idiots a decade ago when he embarked on the mass slaughter of his own people. (For an honourable alternative far-left example, note how the UK’s Alliance for Workers Liberty has stood solidly with the people of Ukraine, and forcefully condemned Hamas, and protested Israel’s war in Gaza.)
It is perhaps no surprise that this left is so blasé about the prospect of a Trump victory that they would advocate turning away from Biden and handing victory to the greatest threat to western order since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Trump at least has the good grace to be fairly transparent that he would sacrifice the Ukrainians for the simple reason that he doesn’t give a damn. This left has had the nerve to try to cloak their sacrificing of a sovereign people’s heroic struggle in the respectable garb of a desire for ‘peace’. The Ukrainian people know what kind of peace this would be, and that, as Rousseau had it, ‘tranquillity is to be found in dungeons.’
The exhilaration of a pogrom
I make a request of the reader here: that after each and every one of the examples that follow, you digest the words alongside the image of Louk on that truck. I know that I am, in many ways, engaging in the same intrusion of her privacy and dignity by exhorting you to do this, and I beg her forgiveness: she deserves better than to be used as a prop to illustrate the horrors of those who rejoiced in her death.
Similarly, I know that every one of the 1189 slain, and each of the 252 hostages, 37 of whom are now also presumed dead, possesses their own unique and equal tragedy. But, rather appropriately for an essay on a left which can accurately be described as Stalinist, there is some truth in the monster’s dictum that while one death is a tragedy, mass death becomes a statistic. I would not give the reader that get-out, but have them face squarely the tragedy in the person of Shani.
There was something about the Nova massacre, in particular, which seemed to especially excite the anti-Zionist left, just as there was something in particular which appalled the rest of us. Though I have never relished it myself, I have always found something joyous and life-affirming in others’ communal acts of youthful hedonism – young people united, however temporarily, in pleasurable abandon and the satisfaction simply of being alive, and together.
Into such a scene came the killers, murdering, raping, and dismembering with equally gay abandon. It is this conjunction of innocent and evil pleasure which I find so sickeningly unforgettable. ‘Where dance is, there is the devil,’ said John Chrysostom, the Christian church father who was, in many ways, the original antisemite. He meant it in the same way that all pious totalitarians mean to restrict pleasure, but at Nova the Golden Tongue’s words attained a much more literal accuracy.
Many saw nothing so horrific in Nova; quite the reverse. Shani Louk and her fellow victims were not even cold when, on 7 October, UC Merced Associate Professor of History and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Sean Malloy retweeted the following observation on the brutal slaughter of Louk and other hedonistic youngsters at the Nova party from @dunksdeux:
imagine you’re drinking a $18 sparkling water called Butterfly Mist, rolling on the worst molly ever stamped, and listening to EDM from the bush administration when Hamas guys start dropping out of the sky. thats the kind of shit that in the old testament meant god is mad at you.
Take a pause and let that vile, slacker-posing sink in… and now rejoin me for more of the same.
Louk’s body had been dragged back to Gaza, spat upon, and sequestered God knows where by the time, on 8 October, when a speaker at the All Out for Palestine bacchanal in New York offered the whooping crowd the following: ‘as you might have seen, there was some sort of rave or desert party where they were having a great time, until the resistance came in electrified hang gliders and took at least several dozen hipsters.’ (The emphasis is mine.) This was a protest, with accompanying swastikas, promoted by the Democratic Socialists of America. And lo, how I wept with the ghosts of Michael Harrington and Irving Howe.[4]
Note the thrill in both responses. These innocent young people were not merely expendables, eggs whose breaking facilitates the great liberationary omelette. That would be awful enough. But no, there is real joy here, real pleasure at the massacre as an antiseptic cleansing. It’s not only ‘they must die’ but ‘they deserve to die’. In doing so it goes beyond standard far-left dogma to the language of Untermensch.
It is in vain that we, and their families, proclaim the innocence of the murdered, the raped, and the kidnapped. ‘Settlers are not civilians. This is not hard,’ tweeted Zareena Grewal, Associate Professor of American Studies, Ethnicity, Race, & Migration and Religious Studies at Yale University. When I saw this tweet, having first lifted jaw from floor, my mind immediately went to a recollection of the American pragmatist philosopher Sidney Hook. In a famous moment, which really should be better remembered, Bertolt Brecht, then about as venerated a playwright and socialist as Europe had to offer, went to visit Hook in New York in 1935. The conversation turned, as it was wont to do in left-wing circles in those days, to the Moscow Trials. Hook having opined on the horror of innocent comrades being shot, Brecht purportedly replied ‘the more innocent they are, the more they deserve to be shot.’ Having ensured he had understood the great playwright correctly, Hook promptly slung him out; also correctly. The point should be moot, but which of the over 1189 dead and 252 kidnapped was Grewal identifying as ‘settlers’? Answer: all Israelis are settlers, and, in Grewal’s estimation, all are thus ripe for slaughter.
The academic Balázs Berkovits summarised this kind of un-victiming of Israelis rather neatly, and with fully appropriate horror. ‘This non-recognition of the victim status of Israelis and Jews is doubly antisemitic,’ he wrote:
it not only rests on antisemitic presuppositions but also potentially yields the most extreme antisemitic consequences. This perspective essentially strips Jews of their humanity, portraying them as being incapable of becoming victims. Consequently, it rationalizes any harm inflicted upon them, given that the concepts of ‘Jew and ‘victim’ are seen as mutually exclusive. This viewpoint also paves the way for justifying and potentially endorsing all future acts of violence against them. In contrast, this thinking automatically absolves even its most inhumane and barbarian enemies who in any other context would be considered as the enemy of humanity as a whole. This is worse than Holocaust denial: this is the outright justification of all potential Holocausts.
Thus, being merely a demonstrably gentle and decent person (and a conscientious objector, incidentally), Louk’s life meant nothing. And, not being accepted as one of the wretched of the earth – and Jews never are – she may be killed and her body degraded, not only with impunity but with glory.
Further joy followed, and from more eminent sources than Malloy. Joseph Massad, Professor of Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History at Columbia University, had a full day to properly process what had unfolded when he said, ‘Perhaps the major achievement of the resistance in the temporary takeover of these settler-colonies is the death blow to any confidence that Israeli colonists had in their military and its ability to protect them.’
Russell Rickford, Associate Professor of History at Cornell University, had even longer, asking a protest on 15 October: ‘What has Hamas done?’ In answer, he said:
Hamas has shifted the balance of power. Hamas has punctured the illusion of invincibility. That’s what they’ve done. You don’t have to be a Hamas supporter to recognise that. Hamas has changed the terms of the debate. Israeli officials are right, nothing will be the same again. Nothing will be the same again. Hamas has challenged the monopoly of violence.
He continued,
And in those first few hours – even as horrific acts were being carried out, many of which we would not learn about until later, there were many thousands of goodwill, many Palestinians, conscious, who abhor violence – as do you, as do I – who abhor the targeting of civilians – as do you, as do I – who were able to breathe! They were able to breathe, for the first time in years! It was exhilarating. It was exhilarating, it was energizing. And if they weren’t exhilarated by this challenge to the monopoly of violence, by this shifting of the balance of power, then they would not be human. I was exhilarated.
(I quote Rickford in full, as most have not, for reasons of fairness and because his professed abhorring of violence against civilians does not much exculpate him in any case.)
I do not know if the heady intoxication has now worn off, or if these ghouls felt the same exhilaration watching the footage recently released by the families of IDF spotters Liri Albag, Karina Ariev, Agam Berger, Daniella Gilboa, and Naama Levy, kidnapped from the Nahal Oz base. (I include a link to the video here, when I deliberately did not link to the viral photo of Shani Louk, for the simple reason that the families of the five are desirous that it be shown as much as possible to remind the world, and their own government, of their desperate situation.) In it the five young women, clad in pyjamas, not one of them out of their teens, and three visibly bloodied, are shown utterly terrified. There is a moment in it when Berger looks at the camera, her face fixed with one of the most abject expressions I can recall. It haunts me. These were the most fearsome and guilty apparatchiks of the omnipotent Zionist entity laid low by the brave insurgency. (A note on the horror of 7 October being such a thoroughly and narcissistically self-filmed outrage: we are watching Naama Levy’s October 7 play out like a horror film made by Christopher Nolan. For the last eight months our last pre-captivity image of her was her being dragged savagely by the hair into a jeep, soaked in blood, while a baying mob rushed to get a good look at her torment. Now, eight months into her hell we see the moments from hours before.)
These are professors, and they were not the only ones. The academic calling is both an immense privilege and, in its opportunity for the moulding of young minds, a tremendous responsibility. Can it be that the role has been so widely debased that such educators are comfortable cheerleading pogromchiks, are happy to ape the Cossack mama whooping on the pitchfork-wielding mob?
Leftist fetish for ‘revolutionary’ violence is nothing new, of course. The current vogue may be for Fanon, but one can find much the same in the works of much earlier Marxists: in George Sorel, for whom violence was a vital proletarian impulse far beyond the understanding of the humanistic rationalism of what he contemptuously dismissed as ‘bourgeois philosophy’. Or in the Peruvian Marxist JC Mariategui, who wrote, in condemnation of the moderation of the Second International, ‘if the revolution demands violence, authority, discipline, I am all for violence, authority, discipline. I accept them in block form, with all their horrors, without any cowardly reserves.’ The Fanonist post-colonial emphasis was certainly emergent by the time Tariq Ali, the street-fighting man himself, enthused in 2006 of the ascendancy of Muqtada, Haniya, Nasrallah, Ahmadinejad, that ‘a radical wind is blowing from the alleys and shacks of the latter-day wretched of the earth.’ The radicalism was, of course, in this rogue’s gallery being ‘anti-western’, as well as un-squeamish enough to withstand the concerns of polite ‘bourgeois philosophy’.
In a similar vein, come 7 October and some were shocked that we were shocked. Najma Sharif, an American writer, tweeted, ‘What did y’all think decolonisation meant? vibes? papers? essays? losers’ – in a demotic echo of Robespierre’s response to the Girondist Louvet’s complaint about the excesses of The Terror: ‘did you want a revolution without a revolution?’ (And was there not something of A Tale of Two Cities’ Madame Defarge about the real-time celebration of executions on Twitter?)
What was also evident the week of 7 October was the extent to which the massacre was, for some, not about real people and their slaughter at all, but rather a pseudo-scholarly dialectic. I am somehow both chilled to the marrow and grasping for the painkillers when I (re)read the following from Harper’s editor Lake Micah, from 8 October:
to search for an analogue seems almost inappropriate to Palestinians’ world-historical(!) audacity to seize the components of self-determination for themselves, if only because the idiom of liberation invents itself anew with each instance that the yoke of bondage is sloughed off… we haven’t seen much like this even when we have, is my view. What this is or isn’t exists in a bind that historical example can be of only some use to. But the contemporary assessment is unambiguous: their righteousness of cause and singularity of circumstance are inextricable… a near-century’s pulverized overtures toward ethnic realization, of groping for a medium of existential latitude—these things culminate in drastic actions in need of no apologia. The thrum of history as it develops is one of force; its inertia and advance require some momentum.
It is like reading Lenin on a bad day (and he had many), the hideousness of the message matched only by the thumping leadenness of the prose. Beyond the impenetrable jargon, at least some meaning can be gleaned: dead Jews are nothing next to the ‘thrum of history’. (Hat tip to @primalpoly for his reply to Micah: ‘You’re defending mass rape by terrorists. Maybe take a step back from your multisyllabic pretentiousness and look at the reality of what you’re defending.’ Even more to the pith of @StonewallArthur who contented himself with a memed ‘What the fuck are you talking about?!’)
Some were not content to enjoy the bloodshed by proxy, but seemed intent on joining in. Jemma DeCristo, Assistant Professor of American Studies at UC Davis tweeted on 10 October that ‘zionist journalists’ have ‘houses w addresses, kids in school … they can fear their bosses, but they should fear us more.’ The tweet ended with emojis of a knife, an axe and drops of blood.
One does not need fluency in the thuddingly impenetrable semiotics the post-modern left substitutes for actual moral philosophy to spot the unavoidable meaning of all this: the only good Israeli is a dead Israeli, and any dead Israeli is good.
I shall leave the examples here, having brought the reader only a flavour of the activist-intellectual response and spared them the thousands upon thousands of tweets etc from the average Joe along similar lines. (And it is just a flavour. Should you wish to be further depressed read above all Alan Johnson’s ‘“Progressives” and the Hamas Pogrom: An A-Z Guide’,[5] and further compilations, from Fathom alone.[6]
Nor do I pick on the individuals mentioned as being extraordinary. On the contrary, I note their contributions as being rather representative of a wider phenomenon. As such, the conclusion is unavoidable: that this a movement and a caste of mind that have lost even the barest connection to the compassion and elementary decency which is the basis of any properly left politics.
Only one rung down from the cheerleaders were the denialists – the ‘show me the evidence’ of rape-ers and those who suddenly became experts in the Hannibal Protocol. The pattern of thinking here is remarkably similar to previous instances of what used to be called Useful Idiocy. The great Polish historian of Marxism Leszek Kołakowski observed how anyone in the west who said to the pro-Soviet left that there were concentration camps in the motherland was instantly labelled a ‘cold warrior’. And since a cold warrior was by definition wrong, ergo there were no camps in the Soviet Union. (Bernard Shaw was a telling and early exponent of this malady: there could be no famine in the Soviet Union, he said, since he had never eaten so well as on his visit there.) So too, those who have tried to amplify the voices of the Israeli women’s movement in drawing attention to the widespread sexual violence on 7 October are, of course, ‘Zionists’. And since Zionists are all nefarious liars, there was no sexual violence.
I genuinely do not know if the denialists sincerely believe their denials, or if it is simply a case of the god not being allowed to fail. If having established the Palestinian cause as righteous – which of course it is – it can only remain righteous if all evil done in its name is denied. Such an idea is of course ridiculous, but perhaps Nietzsche was right in thinking that ‘Man’s dishonesty with himself is his greatest enemy. When he makes a mistake, his memory admits, “I have done this,” but his pride opposes by saying, “I cannot have done this,” and pride wins out over memory.’
As ever, Orwell was certainly right in observing that ‘atrocities are believed in or disbelieved in solely on grounds of political predilection. Everyone believes in the atrocities of the enemy and disbelieves in those of his own side, without ever bothering to examine the evidence.’ He saw plenty of this and would have none of it. ‘These things really happened, that is the thing to keep one’s eye on,’ Orwell insisted. And ‘they happened even though Lord Halifax said they happened,’ the point being that something is not an invention of propaganda merely because one’s opponent or enemy claims it to be true. I quite agree, and might perhaps claim a modest amount of credit in having three times insisted to Israelis that disgraceful practices and odious arguments in the conduct of the war in Gaza must be faced.[7] What Orwell would have made of Yannis Varoufakis, the former Greek Finance Minister and hero of the anti-NATO left, assuring us that ‘the criminals here are not Hamas… the criminals are Europeans,’ is not hard to guess.
Not that the anti-Zionists will care, but the shock and betrayal felt by the Israeli left continues to be palpable. Much of the anti-occupation left has, like me, backed Israel’s duty to fight Hamas but not the conduct of the war. ‘All I Want to Say to the International Left Is – Go to Hell,’ ran the not unreasonable title of Israeli writer Lilach Volach’s cri de coeur in the ultra-dovish Haaretz in late October. When I interviewed Fania Oz-Salzberger in early April, she was still in shock, and comforted only by the solidarity she had received from older, social democratic leftists.
Hebrew University Professor Eva Illouz, in a fine article, made clear that from their respective reactions to the massacre, anti-occupation Israelis should now look to Arab Israelis, who ‘have shown the compassion the doctrinal left has so shockingly lacked. They have stood by our side. It is them with whom we must build a party of humanity determined to bring justice and peace. The global left has made itself irrelevant from now on.’ (The anti-occupation left should have been looking more to Arab Israelis for a long time, but this is another matter.)
Cooperation and the utilitarian ethic being far beneath them, the anti-Zionists have as little interest in supporting potential comrades in Israel as they do in genuine peace and the hard work that is essential to it. They are quite clear by their own words that anything so practical or moderated as two states is far beneath them, and that nothing short of the eradication of the state of Israel will sate their appetite (though such is their obsession that they would miss it were it gone).
They cheer the Palestinians on, from a safe distance of course, to a full re-conquest of Palestine that is hateful for being inevitably murderous and doubly so for being utterly delusional. The Israeli anti-occupation left are nothings and nobodies, Zionism’s useful idiots, while brave activists like those at Standing Together fail the purity test as quisling normalisers.
On Campus
With so much of this hellacious bullshit in the academy, can it be a surprise when it percolates down to the student body? Emerging minds should not be judged by the same standard as those which are fully (de)formed, of course, and nor do I want to fish with a trawler’s net when what is always required with the identification of antisemitism is the long line. Many people actively protesting the war in Gaza are simply furious and heartbroken at a truly brutal eight-month conflict, and outrage at the evisceration of Gaza speaks well of them. Except, it might reasonably be said, when it follows or is accompanied by denial, evasion, or outright rejoicing at 7 October or the explicit championing of Hamas. Then, might we not justly conclude that what motivates those protesters is not a humanistic desire for peace, justice, and an end to bloodshed, but rather the prospect of 7 October redux and redux?
Améry was rather charitable to the youthful naivete of those who in his own time mirrored many of today’s campus protesters. ‘The young leftist will surely reject with disdain,’ he wrote, ‘the suggestion that their anti-Zionism incorporates elements of crude antisemitism, and quite rightly so … Yet, as our young would-be Marx experts should surely know, given the objective historical situation, individual intentions and goals as such count for little. The seedbed in which the young left operates with its anti-Zionist furore nurtures the sprouts of a centuries-old anti-Semitism, which has been anything but “mastered”. Somewhere, every “down with the Zionist oppression“ finds an echo sounding remarkably like “perish Judah!”’
We might even allow that there is some naivete at work, even a certain amount of fedayeen cosplay. Chanting for intifada is, after all, rather easier if you did not live through the campaign of mass suicide murder accompanying the second iteration, or through the severe Israeli crackdown of Defensive Shield. Yes, these are very western displays; ‘violent revolution turn[ing] to myth,’ Améry noted, ‘only where, for good reasons, it cannot and will not take place…’ In such cases, ‘the armed rebellion in the name of human emancipation has become a petrified myth and aestheticised slogan.’
But Améry also knew that ‘silliness is by no means invariably harmless,’ so forgive us if we do not treat as benign, laudable even, chants like: ‘We don’t want two states, what we want is ‘48’; ‘No justice, no peace . . . Intifada, intifada, globalise the intifada’; ‘Long live Palestine, Palestine forever, from the river to the sea’; ‘Red, black, green, and white, we support Hamas’s fight’; ‘Hitler, Hitler, go back home! Palestine is ours alone’; ‘Al-Qassam, you make us proud; kill another soldier now!’; ‘Say it loud, say it clear: we do not want Zionists here’; ‘Oh, al-Qassam, you make us proud! Kill another soldier now’; ‘Resistance by any means necessary’; ‘Palestine is our demand! No peace on stolen land’; ‘We say justice. You say how? Burn Tel Aviv to the ground!’
In the era of micro aggressions – a neologistic concept to which I am far more sympathetic than nearly all on the ‘pro-Israel’ side – might we conclude that these aggressions are somewhat more than micro, and that it is egregious to ask Jewish students to circumvent these deafening cauldrons just in order to receive their (hugely expensive) education?
This war has indeed been a horror show, Sunday’s deadly inferno at the temporary camp in Rafah the latest utterly and depressingly predictable agony. It has been prosecuted at the political level by fools and knaves with neither concern for Gazan life nor anything approaching a coherent strategy. I support its genesis unequivocally and loathe its prosecution equally vehemently, and have said so publicly, in print, on three occasions.
I cannot join the protesters on the barricades for the elemental reason that too many of them have explicitly sanctioned the murder of my friends. Pretty basic stuff really. If faced with Columbia student protest leader Khymani James, in fact, it would be as much self-interest as fraternal solidarity which caused me to run. For James would murder me, too. ‘Zionists don’t deserve to live,’ you see. James assures us that ‘I don’t fight to injure or for there to be a winner or a loser, I fight to kill,’ but I am not much mollified by the thought that my end would be quick. The Columbia disciplinary panel to which James spoke these words was apparently rather less concerned than I, since they acted only when the clip went viral.
Show me a protest which hates the war and Hamas in equal measure; which seeks desperately a free Palestine alongside a secure Israel; which is possessed of a moral clarity and a belief in the sanctity of all innocent life: I will be there, placard in hand, in a heartbeat. There has been no such protest because there is no anti-war left presently capable of it. A note to them: if you want to see how it is done, follow the extraordinary exiled Gazan writer Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib. Alkhatib has so far lost 31 members of his extended family to the war and manages to hate and protest it while also inveighing against the evils of Hamas, consequently making many enemies amongst other supposed proponents of the Palestinian cause who would justify 7 October. His is a truly moral position.
A left that can account for Shani
The road to this squalid reaction to 7 October has been a long one, with many a disastrous turn leading the far left into ever more dangerous and bankrupt territory. It is what happens when dogma becomes more fashionable than critical thought; when radicalism trumps reason; when the antidote to Orientalism is taken to be Occidentalism; when the counter to cultural imperialism is moral relativism; when it is ‘better to be wrong with Sartre than right with Aron’; when Foucault decides, for us all, that Iranian women and Iranian democrats can go to hell – the Ayatollah is, after all, just too damned exciting.
Yes, the present swamp was fed by myriad fetid tributaries. So too does it inevitably become more and more contaminated. Generations raised on blather masquerading as profundity and on nihilism masquerading as radical chic. This next generation has far exceeded Butler in both irrationality and the explicitness of its contempt for Israeli life. Butler at least offered a condemnation of 7 October, of sorts (though it was still ‘armed resistance’, not ‘terrorism’) only to find that the beast they have played a not inconsiderable part in creating now considered them rather a copout. And your sons and your daughters are beyond your command…
Yes, the left of the 21st century needed the children of Victor Serge and Sophie Scholl, of Dr King and Nye Bevan. In too many places has it received instead the children of Nechayev and Che, of Mao and Ulrike Meinhof. For many this treason has led to a self-imposed exile, an auto-excommunication from the left. For me, as for Améry before me, this is impossible. Whether we are capable of a consequential renaissance remains to be seen. It is a Sisyphean task and one which 7 October has shown us cannot be left to the gatekeepers. No, as Améry noted, ‘the answer must come not so much from those who hold positions of responsibility but primarily from those possessed of an actual sense of responsibility.’ Go with Orwell, if you prefer, and that the answer lies with the proles.
The wait may be a long one. In the meantime, I would encourage the emerging leftist who senses something wrong in all this but is not quite sure where to start, to begin by adapting the famous proposition of Rabbi Greenberg. After the holocaust, said the Rabbi, ‘No statement, theological or otherwise, should be made that would not be credible in the presence of the burning children.’ Well, henceforth, brook no statement from the left on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that would not be credible if uttered on that truck with Shani. It is the best – perhaps it is all – you can do for her now.
[1] The journey towards a Kronstadt had in fact begun a little earlier when, amid the hell into which Iraq was plunged by sectarian insurgency in the mid ‘00s, it became clear to me that many of those with whom I had marched against the Anglo-American war seemed less to be heartbroken that their warnings had proven justified, and more to actually want the jihadi insurgents to win.
[2] Fathom editor Alan Johnson reminded me that this vile degradation also called to mind the moment in Primo Levi’s If This is a Man in which an SS officer wipes his hands on Levi as though he were a rag.
[3] The unwanted serendipity continued: as I began writing this essay, news came through that the body of Louk’s boyfriend, Orión Hernández Radoux, had been found.
[4] Democratic socialists both, Harrington founded the DSA and Howe was one of its most eminent members. Both would, I am quite certain, be appalled by the post 7 October conduct of a once venerable organisation.
[5] Johnson first published this compendium of Hamas apologia on 9 October. He continued to add to it before wisely concluding that such was the torrent of similar material it would soon devolve into a full-time job.
[6] See, for example: https://fathomjournal.org/opinion-why-dont-israeli-women-count-for-un-women/;
https://fathomjournal.org/after-the-pogrom-an-australian-journalist-reflects/;
https://fathomjournal.org/eat-their-skulls-the-pleasures-of-antisemitism-updated-after-7-october/;
https://fathomjournal.org/universities-in-crisis-glorifying-atrocities-the-case-of-brown-university/
[7] See Alan Johnson & Jack Omer-Jackaman, ‘Opinion | For the Total Defeat of Hamas, Against the “Total Siege” of Gaza’, Fathom, October 2023; Jack Omer-Jackaman, ‘What Justice Requires in Gaza’, Persuasion, 13 December 2023; Jack Omer-Jackaman, ‘Opinion | Yes to recognising a Palestinian state now’, Fathom, March 2024.
