… as of October 2023, the Anglosphere’s far-Left has neatly pivoted from the infantilization of black people to the Palestinian cause with the coordinated grace of a synchronized swimmer … Thus, an organization established for the defense of free speech of every sort – including the overtly Zionist kind – is necessarily obliged to openly advocate for Hamas, a murderous, cheerfully anti-Semitic cult whose interest in free speech on its home turf would fit in a thimble … For these authors, defense of free speech, promotion of tolerance, and opposition to violent political oppression – the very purpose of PEN – counted for nothing when weighed against any injury to the delicate feelings of fundamentalist Muslims
…Much has been written about the unholy and in some ways hilarious alliance developing between the progressive Left and Islam (Lesbians for Palestine, etc.). But for Western writers to embrace a restrictive, prescriptive, and stifling culture isn’t merely ironic or comical; it’s self-defeating. One needn’t consult a professor of Middle Eastern Studies to conclude that these fair-weather friends in Gaza may welcome useful idiocy, but the permissive ethos of the Anglo-Left is diametrically at odds with despotic Islamic theology. Moreover, for American writers to express increasingly shrill and little-disguised hostility to Jews is to disavow a substantial chunk of the country’s distinguished literary canon: Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Bernard Malamud, and Elie Weisel just for starters.
The term “luxury beliefs” was coined to describe how privileged progressives like to traffic in a kind of unhinged extremist rhetoric. Partly, it’s a byproduct of their insulation from ever having to experience the practical impact of what they advocate. When people in Australia chant “from the river to the sea”, and “gas the Jews”, relatively few are saying this because they have a material interest in obliterating the real Israel and rendering the land “Judenfrei” (remember that word!) More have no particular animus toward Jewish people – they just don’t care about them. But most are moved by a desire to weaken what Israel symbolizes: the US.
Many left-wing impressions are coloured by a an antipathy for the policies of the United States, an antipathy that for many was born of the Vietnam War and was perpetuated by America’s interference in the affairs of nations large and small since then – and of course, America’s strong ideological and military support for Israel. Uncle Sam certainly does have a case to answer. There’s no denying the hundreds of thousands, millions maybe, of bodies of men, women and children that could be laid at the foot of Abe Lincoln’s huge statue in Washington DC. But giving aid and comfort to a regime that is antithetical to your beliefs and also your lifestyle does not compute. It is an ideological stance uninformed by knowledge and awareness of the nature of the Israeli and Palestinian entities, their peoples, and their cultures in the 21st Century. None of these are what they were in the nineteen seventies and eighties.
Writing in The Australian on 29th October, commentator Gemma Tognini wrote: “As I watched mainly white, middle-class privileged (in the truest sense of that word, not the co-opted, cheapened version) people parade themselves around as soft apologists for a declared terror organization, I felt despair. How? How did we get here? … What’s been on display on university campuses since October 7 has been terrifying in its historical illiteracy, lack of humanity and ideological zealotry”.
It’s worthwhile quoting what else she had to say about such “luxury beliefs”:
“… This is the soft generation. Their grandparents fought type 2 diabetes, not Nazism. It was reported that (perhaps unsurprisingly) the University of Sydney Student Representative Council urged students to “stand against oppression … until Palestine is free”. Let me tell you one thing I’m willing to bet on. Not one of them would volunteer to go help the cause. Not one of them would give up their Uber eats, days at the pub and total freedom to go live in a place where being gay is an offence punishable by death, fewer than 20 per cent of women are allowed to work and more than 20 per cent of women are married under the age of 17. Good luck wearing a bikini or your active wear in downtown Gaza.
And then, there’s a punchline: “… this conflict in the Middle East, this visceral, existential attack on Israel, and on Jewish people the world over, seems to have ripped something open to reveal an ideological hatred that I don’t understand. It’s a good impetus to raise the voting age, to be honest. If your response to the fact that the Arab states are refusing to take refugees, that Egypt won’t open its northern border for the same reason, is “Israel’s committing genocide”, then sorry, you’re not intellectually agile enough to be in the conversation … If it were 1400 young people barbarically slaughtered anywhere else in the world, if it were any other ethnic cohort, these same junior cowards, and the universities they attend, would be condemning the act and the actors”
I couldn’t say it better, particularly her allusion to “historical illiteracy, lack of humanity and ideological zealotry”. Many people out there in the world of university politics, social media, and reflex virtue signalling, have, for a variety of reasons a limited, even cursory knowledge of the roots and fruits of intractable conflicts that originated decades, centuries, millennia ago. As the late Israeli Amos Oz explained in his excellent book, How to Cure a Fanatic, Arabs and Jews typically understand each other far better than westerners understand either of them. Cost-free wisdom from western liberals is so often pathetically ill-informed and bathing in self-righteousness.
When Western leftists celebrate an open defense of Hamas’ ‘exhilarating’ murder of civilians but censor texts that humanize Israelis or deplatform Jews, they’re not acting in solidarity with Palestinians. It’s an armchair glorification of faraway violence that could rightly be called colonial
Relatives of victims of October 7 at an installation bearing the photos of loved ones killed or kidnapped during the Nova festival. AFP
By now, it shouldn’t be surprising to anyone that there are those on the Western left who openly support the attacks of October 7 on Israeli civilians. The past six months have produced a long list of examples.
The latest came when Verso Books, easily the most renowned left-wing publishing house in the English-speaking world, released an article on its website by political theorist Jodi Dean.
Dean’s position was made clear from her opening sentence in which she announces the image of October 7 paragliders, those who would go on to help brutally murder more than 300 young participants in a trance music festival, were “exhilarating” for her. She goes on to criticize the Western left for not doing enough to support Hamas and making clear that “[by] defending Hamas, we take the side of the Palestinian resistance.”
She writes: “Which side are you on? Liberation or Zionism and imperialism? There are two sides and no alternative, no negotiation of the relation between oppressor and oppressed.”
Palestinians transport Noa Argamani, southern Israel to the Gaza Strip on October 7. AP
The article made even more news after Dean’s employer, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, started an investigation into her based on the article and temporarily relieved her of classroom duties.
Dean called the move “McCarthyism” and she has since become a cause in herself, with many among many well-known academics declaring their “solidarity” with her.
As an historian of political ideas, the fact that some human beings gleefully support brutalization and murder of others is, alas, not surprising to me. After all, the worst human atrocities, from the Cambodian genocide to Syria’s Bashar Assad‘s killing of hundreds of thousands of his own people, have long had their enthusiastic supporters, not least those on Western campuses
Images of Hamas militants parading the body of Shani Louk, a 22-year-old Israeli woman, on the back of a pickup truck, her body clad only in her underwear, while people take turn in spitting on her, were awful to many of us who could imagine in her, a sister, a cousin, a friend. To others, they could have been, well, “exhilarating,” justifiable as part of a broader political campaign. In the same way, some have rationalized any number of brutalities enacted upon Palestinian civilians.
So I am not writing these lines to profess my shock and disgust at Dean’s writing, but rather to place it in a political context and to show what it tells us about the state of the acceptable discourse on the Western left.
Just a month ago, about a dozen editors resigned from their unpaid positions at Guernica, a respected left-leaning American online magazine, over an essay published by Joanna Chen, an Israeli writer and peace activist.
Joanna Chen
The essay, which was soon retracted by Guernica, was denounced by one resignee as “hand-wringing apologia for Zionism and the ongoing genocide in Palestine.” In fact, Chen is pacifist enough to have refused mandatory service in the Israel Defense Forces.
When not translating Arabic and Hebrew poetry, she was volunteering to drive Palestinian children from the West Bank to Israeli hospitals. Her beautiful essay doesn’t give an ounce of support to Israel’s assault on Gaza and is instead brimming with humanity, full of empathy for all the people between river and the sea. As Guernica’s editor-in-chief, Jina Moore, who has since resigned herself amid the debacle, later put it, it addresses “caregiving as a political act as aligned with a long tradition of feminist writing.”
What was the controversy about then?
Simply put, Chen’s “crime” was that she is an Israeli who painted a humanized image of Israelis as real people; not nameless, faceless ‘settlers’ who are dehumanized enough so that a massacre of 1,200 of them, the kidnapping of over 230 be so boastfully celebrated.
Friday, Guernica’s founder Michael Archer, said Chen’s essay should have never been published, writing, “Rather than mine the personal to expose the political, individual angst was elevated above the collective suffering laid bare in the extensive body of work Guernica has published from the region.”
We saw another version of such controversy much earlier just after the October 7 attacks, when Canadian leftist writer Naomi Klein dared to write a piece in which she complained about “some of our supposed comrades on the left [who] continue to minimize massacres of Israeli civilians, and some even seem to celebrate them, as if doing so proves their bad-ass anti-Zionism.”
Even though Klein supports the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement and had gone out of her way to denounce Zionism in the very same piece, she met with such avalanche of opposition that she edited her piece within hours.
The new corrected version affirmed in a note at the bottom that “celebrations of the deaths were rare,” which begged the question: Why had she written it in the first place? She had now taken out the part about “bad-ass anti-Zionism” and added an acknowledgement about the “desire to celebrate the powerful symbolism of Palestinians escaping the open air prison that is Gaza – which occupied people have every right to do.”
The paragraph at the top is as it originally appeared in The Guardian by Naomi Klein on October 11, and below it is as it appeared after editing following pushback.
A bigger controversy is currently riling the literary world. Numerous writers, including many well-known names, resigned en masse from events and awards associated with PEN America, an association of writers dedicated to free speech.
This furor began in February when PEN America hosted an author’s event in Los Angeles for stand-up comedian Moshe Kasher’s memoir. He was joined on stage by his close friend, “The Big Bang Theory” actress Mayim Bialik whose pro-Israel commentary on the war has riled some. The event had nothing to do with the Middle East. The two were there to talk about the latter’s memoir which accounts his growing up in a deaf and Jewish household, journey through Alcoholics Anonymous and eventual landing in the world of comedy.
But PEN was accused of “platforming” Bialik, the implication being that she shouldn’t be allowed a platform to talk about anything, even if unrelated to the Middle East, not even her friend’s memoir.
Put together, these events show the framework of accepted discourse on Israel-Palestine on large sections of the American left and literary world. Publishing open defense of murdering Israeli civilians is hardly controversial and can even gain you “solidarity.” But publishing an essay that humanizes them is beyond the pale. This one-sided censoriousness is mirrored on the other side of the divide by those that ban any support to the Palestinian cause or sometimes a mere mention of Palestine, with the most extreme case being seen in Germany.
Turning to Dean’s essay itself, we find clues as to why some celebrations of violence against civilians are so welcome among parts of the Western left.
Dean calls herself a communist but what “communist” measure can she take that influences politics in the United States in any meaningful way? She is a member of the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) which has runs in US elections for years. Its most spectacular success came in 2021 when a candidate it supported for city council in a small college town in Illinois got 40 percent of the vote (he still lost.) What better way to compensate for political irrelevance than by defending the most extreme position in support of Hamas?
Unsurprisingly, staunchly anti-Western PSL also supports Russia’s annexation of Ukrainian territory, Assad’s regime in Syria and North Korea’s nuclear weapons program. This all sure sound more “exhilarating” than running and losing in a city council race in Illinois.
In defense of her position, Dean cites the Western left’s adulation of Palestinian militants in the heady days of 1960s and 70s, specifically the left-wing Popular Front for Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and its fabled plane hijackings including those by its most famous member, Leila Khaled. This works particularly well for her argument since PFLP continues to exist and celebrated the October 7 attacks.
This historical placing is also telling. Indeed, if the Western left then gave support to politically insane acts like PLFP plane hijackings, it was also to compensate for its lack of political relevance back home. Dean cites Khaled’s memoirs where she defended hijackings as “[acting] heroically in a cowardly world” and claimed that “the more spectacular the action the better the morale of our people.” With historical hindsight, we know that the “spectacular” actions of the militants produced a lot of “exhilaration,” but no progressive political change for Palestinians or anyone else. They arguably set back the Palestinian cause by decades.
The only difference is that, back then, those leftists actually took part in similar violent actions in home and abroad, putting their bodies on the line for their short-sighted political adventures. Now, a blog post is most they muster.
This isn’t about supporting the people of the Middle East, of which I am one, but using us as objects of amusement.
If Dean wanted to show solidarity to the Palestinian left, she could have done so by supporting Marxists such as those in the People’s Party of Palestine or the Palestinian-led Communist Party of Israel, both of whom have been on the forefront of countering the occupation and apartheid policies while also opposing the killing of civilians, whether in Gaza or in the kibbutzim.
But, in 2024 just like in 1970s, that would hardly provide much “exhilaration.” Dean’s act is not one of solidarity, but fetishization of violence in lands faraway. One might even call it colonial.
Arash Azizi is an Iranian historian and writer of “Shadow Commander: Soleimani, the US, and Iran’s Global Ambitions” (2020) and “Iran’s New Revolution: Women, Life, Freedom” (2023). Twitter: @arash_tehran
In That Howling Infinite 