Month: May 2024

Lebensraum Redux – Hamas’ promise of the hereafter

Paul Hemphill Leave a comment

We must differentiate between Jews who should and should not be killed.
The Promise of the Hereafter Post-Liberation Palestine conference September 2021

Mainstream and social media are naturally focused on the plight of Palestinian civilians caught in the crossfire between the IDF and the Hamas terrorists embedded amongst and below them with total disregard for their safety and welfare. Negligible attention is paid to what is not in plain sight.

Hence the widespread denial among pro-Palestinian activists and academics of the atrocities committed by Islamist fighters on October 7th notwithstanding the (belated) corroboration by the United Nations and reputable media outlets. Hence also, reports of the flight to Egypt of tens of thousands on Gazans with the means to cough up the exorbitant fees demanded by Egyptian middlemen.

That such stories are largely disseminated by Israeli media may lead outside observers unsympathetic to Israel to dismiss them as hasbara, derived from the Hebrew for explaining, but interpreted by many, particularly the lazy and the partisan as public diplomacy propaganda, public relations or spin. But to people with a deeper knowledge of Israeli and Palestinian history, politics, and society, and of the Middle East generally, they are potentially quite credible.

The same is true of a conference held in Gaza in September 2021: the Promise of the Hereafter Post-Liberation Palestine conference, sponsored by the Hamas’ leader in Gaza Yahyah al Sinwar and attended by senior officials from Hamas and other Palestinian factions. Whereas much western media commentary discuss what will happen to Gaza and its unfortunate populace “the day after” the war, this gathering discussed preparations for the future administration of the state of Palestine following its “liberation” from Israel after the latter “disappears”.

It is, in essence, a blueprint for expulsion and mass murder, a kind of Lebensraum Redux.

Though reported in October 2021 by the Israel-aligned Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), the conference did not attract mainstream and social media interest at the time. Even after October 7, it has received little coverage, with the exception of Israeli media including Haaretz and Times of Israel – presumably because it might have seemed to some as elaborate hasbara.

The neglect is nonetheless surprising considering its clear exposition of the Islamist, genocidal intent of the Hamas and Islamic Jihad,  and accords with a view held by many knowledgeable and well-informed observers and commentators that the original intent of Operation Al Aqsa Flood was to race en masse across the Negev to the Occupied Territories and spark a general Palestinian rising which would precipitate an invasion of Israel by its Arab neighbours – a repeat of the war of 1948 without its al Nakba outcome.

We’ll probably never really know why this scenario was not followed through, and what may have been the outcome. Some may argue a 100km sprint across the open desert to the nearest Palestinian city, Hebron, was an impossible task. Others might surmise that the militants who descended on the borderland kibbutzim and the Nova Trance Festival to molest, maim and murder were distracted by the easy prey and the release of pent-up rage and brutal vengeance after years of siege in Gaza.

The conference’s concluding statement made clear the Resistance’s understanding of “from the river to the sea” and also its Islamist mission. Its very name originates in Quran 17:104: “And We said thereafter unto the Children of Israel, ‘Dwell in the land. And when the promise of the Hereafter comes to pass, we shall bring you as a mixed assembly”.

It claimed as its historical pedigree Muslim victories in the past – over Christians, not Jews, mind – and proposes what appears to be a “back to the future” plan for “the day after“. The following extract is taken from MEMRI’s report on the event:

“Immediately after the liberation, the liberation forces will issue a Palestinian independence document setting out the Palestinian principles, highlighting the Palestinian national identity and its Arab, Islamic, regional and international depth. The formulation of this document will be overseen by a team of experts in the spheres of politics, law and media, for this will be a historic document on the legal and humanitarian levels, a direct continuation of the Pact of ‘Umar Bin Al-Khattab and of the announcement issued by Salah Al-Din upon his liberation of the Al-Aqsa Mosque [in 1187].”

The conference published a concluding statement listing “ideas and methods of operation [to be implemented] during the liberation of Palestine” after Israel ceases to exist. This list included, inter alia, a call for drafting a document of independence that will be “a direct continuation of the Pact of ‘Umar Bin Al-Khattab” concerning Byzantine Jerusalem’s surrender to the Muslim conquerors which took place apparently in 638; a definition of the leadership of the state until elections are held; recommendations for engagement with the international community and the neighbouring states; a call for preparing in advance appropriate legislation for the transition to the new regime; a call for establishing apparatuses to ensure the continuation of economic activity once the Israeli shekel is no longer in use and to preserve the resources that previously belonged to Israel; and a call for compiling a guide for resettling the Palestinian refugees who wish to return to Palestine.

The conference also recommended that rules be drawn up for dealing with “Jews” in the country, including defining which of them will be killed or subjected to legal prosecution and which will be allowed to leave or to remain and be integrated into the new state. It also called for preventing a brain drain of Jewish professionals, and for the retention of “educated Jews and experts in the areas of medicine, engineering, technology, and civilian and military industry… [who] should not be allowed to leave.” Additionally, it recommended obtaining lists of “the agents of the occupation in Palestine, in the region, and [throughout] the world, and… the names of the recruiters, Jewish and non-Jewish, in the country and abroad” in order to “purge Palestine and the Arab and Islamic homeland of the hypocrite scum”.

Read the complete MEMRI report HERE. It is republished below in full.

A former high-ranking Fatah member from Gaza who was well acquainted with the Hamas leadership recently spoke to Haaretz about another aspect of Hamas’s scheme for the “day after,” namely the administrative division of “liberated Palestine” into cantons. He said he was contacted by a well-known Hamas figure who informed him that Hamas was “preparing a full list of committee heads for the cantons that will be created in Palestine.” In 2021, he was reportedly offered the chairmanship of the “Zarnuqa” committee, named after the Arab village where his family lived before 1948, that was slated to cover the cities of Ramle and Rehovot.

The Fatah official reportedly reacted to the Hamas offer in disbelief: “You’re out of your minds.”

We will do this again and again

Al Aqsa Flood, or Amaliyyat Tufān al Aqsa may have failed, with only the Black Shabbat and the destruction of Gaza to show for it, but without doubt, it ignited a wildfire that has reinvigorated the Palestinian cause in the eyes of the world and severely damaged Israel’s standing on the world stage. The Hamas maintains that the ongoing carnage is justified, with many senior officials, declare in the safety of their sanctuaries in Qatar and Beirut that they’d do it all over again … and again.

One such spokesperson, Ghazi Hamad of the Hamas political bureau, said in an October 24 2023 programme on Lebanon’s LBC TV that the Hamas is prepared to repeat the October 7 “Al Aqsa Flood” Operation time and again until Israel is annihilated. He added that Palestinians are willing to pay the price and that they are “proud to sacrifice martyrs.” Hamad said that Palestinians are the victims of the occupation, therefore no one should blame them for the events of October 7 or anything else, adding: “Everything we do is justified.”

Some extracts:

“We must teach Israel a lesson, and we will do this again and again. The Al-Aqsa Flood is just the first time, and there will be a second, a third, a fourth, because we have the determination, the resolve, and the capabilities to fight. Will we have to pay a price? Yes, and we are ready to pay it. We are called a nation of martyrs, and we are proud to sacrifice martyrs”.

“We did not want to harm civilians, but there were complications on the ground, and there was a party in the area, with [civilian] population… It was a large area, across 40 kilometers”.

“We Are the victims of the Occupation. Therefore, nobody should blame us for the things we do … Everything we do is Justified”

Hamad: “The occupation must come to an end … I am talking about all the Palestinian lands.”

News anchor: “Does that mean the annihilation of Israel?”

Hamad: “Yes, of course”.

“The existence of Israel is illogical. The existence of Israel is what causes all that pain, blood, and tears. It is Israel, not us. We are the victims of the occupation. Period. Therefore, nobody should blame us for the things we do. On October 7, October 10, October 1,000,000 – everything we do is justified”.

Watch the interview HERE.

About MEMRI

The Middle East Media Research Institute is an American non-profit press monitoring and analysis organization that was co-founded by Israeli ex-intelligence officer Yigal Carmon and Israeli-American political scientist Meyrav Wurmser in 1997. It publishes and distributes free copies of media reports that have been translated into English—primarily from Arabic and Persian, but also from Urdu, Turkish, Pashto, and Russian.

Critics describe MEMRI as a strongly pro-Israel advocacy group that, in spite of describing itself as being “independent” and “non-partisan” in nature, aims to portray the Arab world and the Muslim world in a negative light by producing and disseminating incomplete or inaccurate translations of the original versions of the media reports that it re-publishes.[9][10] It has also been accused of selectively focusing on the views of Islamic extremists while de-emphasizing or ignoring mainstream opinions.

For more on Israel and Palestine in In That Howling Infinite, see Middle East Miscellany. See also, Total war in an urban landscape – Israel’s military quandary, Flight into Egypt, and the promise of the hereafter , and The Calculus of Carnage – the mathematics of Muslim on Muslim mortality

‘Promise of the Hereafter’ Conference for the phase following the liberation of Palestine and Israel’s ‘disappearance’: We must differentiate between Jews who should and should not be killed, and prevent a Jewish ‘brain drain’ from Palestine

MEMRI October 4th, 2024

The September 30, 2021 “Promise of the Hereafter[1] – Post-Liberation Palestine” conference, sponsored by Hamas leader in Gaza Yahyah Al-Sinwar and attended by senior officials from Hamas and other Palestinian factions, discussed preparations for the future administration of the state of Palestine following its “liberation” from Israel after the latter “disappears.”

The conference published a concluding statement listing “ideas and methods of operation [to be implemented] during the liberation of Palestine” after Israel ceases to exist. This list included, inter alia, a call for drafting a document of independence that will be “a direct continuation of the Pact of ‘Umar Bin Al-Khattab” concerning Byzantine Jerusalem’s surrender to the Muslim conquerors which took place apparently in 638; a definition of the leadership of the state until elections are held; recommendations for engagement with the international community and the neighboring states; a call for preparing in advance appropriate legislation for the transition to the new regime; a call for establishing apparatuses to ensure the continuation of economic activity once the Israeli shekel is no longer in use and to preserve the resources that previously belonged to Israel; and a call for compiling a guide for resettling the Palestinian refugees who wish to return to Palestine.

The conference also recommended that rules be drawn up for dealing with “Jews” in the country, including defining which of them will be killed or subjected to legal prosecution and which will be allowed to leave or to remain and be integrated into the new state. It also called for preventing a brain drain of Jewish professionals, and for the retention of “educated Jews and experts in the areas of medicine, engineering, technology, and civilian and military industry… [who] should not be allowed to leave.” Additionally, it recommended obtaining lists of “the agents of the occupation in Palestine, in the region, and [throughout] the world, and… the names of the recruiters, Jewish and non-Jewish, in the country and abroad” in order to “purge Palestine and the Arab and Islamic homeland of this hypocrite scum.”

The conference was organized by the Promise of the Hereafter Institute, which was established in 2014; the institute called it “a conference that looks to the future.” Dr. Issam Adwan, chairman of the conference’s preparatory committee and former head of Hamas’s department of refugee affairs, said that the conference’s recommendations would be presented to the Hamas leadership, which also funded the event.[2] The recommendations were also included in the strategies that the Promise of the Hereafter Institute had been drawing up since its establishment to address the phase following the liberation of Palestine.[3]

In his statements for the conference, which were delivered by Hamas political bureau member Kamal Abu Aoun, Hamas leader Al-Sinwar stressed that “we are sponsoring this conference because it is in line with our assessment that victory is nigh” and that “the full liberation of Palestine from the sea to the river” is “the heart of Hamas’s strategic vision.”

This report will review the concluding statement of the September 30, 2021 Promise of the Hereafter conference and statements by several participating officials.

The Concluding Statement Of The “Promise Of The Hereafter” Conference

“Today, on Safar 30, 1443 AH, September 30, 2021, under the generous sponsorship of the leader Yahya Al-Sinwar Abu Ibrahim, head of the Hamas movement in the Gaza Strip, the Promise of the Hereafter Institute held the first strategic vision conference of its kind: the Promise of the Hereafter Conference, which formulated ideas and methods of operation [to be implemented] during the liberation of Palestine in various areas that were discussed at the conference. This complements the strategies that have been formulated by the Promise of the Hereafter Institute since its establishment in 2014, with the aim of providing a clearer vision for those in charge of liberating Palestine. The following are some of the recommendations [formulated at] the conference:

“1. The sovereign body that is to lead the liberation is the Council for the Liberation of Palestine, which is to include all the Palestinian and Arab forces who endorse the idea of liberating Palestine, with the backing of friendly countries.

“2. The liberation of Palestine is the collective duty of the entire [Islamic] nation, first and foremost of the Palestinian people. Its is [therefore] crucial to formulate a plan for utilizing the nation’s resources and dividing the labor among its different components, each according to its abilities. That is the responsibility of the Council for the Liberation of Palestine.

“3. The Council for the Liberation of Palestine will be headed by a general secretariat, led by a steering council, which, upon the liberation of Palestine, will become an executive council headed by an interim presidential council until the holding of presidential and parliamentary elections and the formation of a new government.

“4. Immediately after the liberation, the liberation forces will issue a Palestinian independence document setting out the Palestinian principles, highlighting the Palestinian national identity and its Arab, Islamic, regional and international depth. The formulation of this document will be overseen by a team of experts in the spheres of politics, law and media, for this will be a historic document on the legal and humanitarian levels, a direct continuation of the Pact of ‘Umar Bin Al-Khattab[4] and of the announcement issued by Salah Al-Din upon his liberation of the Al-Aqsa Mosque [in 1187].[5]

“5. Following the liberation, the Palestinian judicial system will be directly regulated by an interim basic law that will allow implementing  the laws from before the establishment of the independent state, each in its area of application, as long as they do not contradict the content of the Palestinian Declaration of Independence or the laws that will be legislated and ratified by the judiciary authorities in Palestine during the interim period or after it, until the unification of the judiciary authorities in Palestine – because the disappearance of states [i.e. Israel] does not mean the disappearance of legal effects, for the law is not abolished but rather amended by another law.

“6. The liberation forces will declare a series of interim laws, to be formulated in advance, including a land and real estate law granting [these forces] control over all state lands and assets, as well as laws [regulating the activity of] the civil service, the interim government, the Palestinian army, the judiciary and security [apparatuses], the return [of the refugees], the [state] comptroller and the municipal authorities.

“7. A [document] will be prepared declaring the application of Palestinian sovereignty over the 1948 territories, setting out a position on various agreements and contracts.

“8. An announcement will be addressed to the UN declaring that the state of Palestine has succeeded the occupation state and will enjoy the rights of the occupation state, based on the articles of the 1978 Vienna Convention on Succession of States.[6]

“9. Upon the liberation, the fate of the national agreements signed by the occupation or the Palestinian Authority will be at the discretion of the Palestinian state, given that the circumstances that prevailed during the occupation of Palestine are not similar to the circumstances that will prevail later. Therefore, it will be possible to consider these agreements from a different perspective, should the [Palestinian] state be inclined to renounce these commitments, born of international agreements that are the basis for the changing circumstances addressed by the 1969 Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties.[7]

“10. The state of Palestine is likely to inherit from the defunct state of ‘Israel’ the agreements delineating the borders with Egypt and Jordan, as well as the economic zone delimitation agreements with Greece in the eastern Mediterranean, the passage and shipping rights in the Gulf of Aqaba, etc. Wise diplomacy will surely find a way to ensure that no side’s interests in the international agreements will suffer, neither the [interests of] the succeeding state (Palestine) or of the other states.

“11. A committee of legal experts will be established today, to study all the agreements, contracts and organizations that the state of ‘Israel’ has joined, and submit recommendations regarding each of them, determining which agreements the state of Palestine [should] choose to inherit and which it [should] not.

“12. The international community and the peoples of the world will be addressed, in order to clarify Palestine’s foreign policy, based on cooperation and mutual respect; a first diplomatic meeting of the ambassadors and representatives of the [various] states will be held in Palestine, in Jerusalem, the city of peace and freedom, so as to underscore the adherence of the free state of Palestine to the international commitments that promote security, stability and development in the region and the world; letters will be sent to the UN, the ambassadors of the various states and the representatives of the various religions in Palestine.

“13. It is inconceivable that one should lose ownership over one’s land… Therefore, land must be restored to its owners as long as no strategically [important] buildings or facilities have been built on it, in which case the owners will receive fair compensation, in money or land.

“14. A basis for a financial administration must be established, which will be ready to start operating immediately, [even] during the liberation efforts… To this end, the new Palestinian junayh[8] should be circulated at the crucial juncture, in order to prevent a deterioration of the situation, and it should be introduced domestically even now, so that people will become accustomed to it. In addition, we may agree with one of the neighboring Arab countries on the use of its currency on a temporary basis during the interim period. In any case the conference advises the Palestinian people not to keep [Israeli] shekels but to change their savings into gold, dollars or dinars.

“15. In dealing with the Jewish settlers on Palestinian land, there must be a distinction in attitude towards [the following]: a fighter who must be killed; a [Jew] who is fleeing and can be left alone or be prosecuted for his crimes in the judicial arena; and a peaceful individual who gives himself up and can be [either] integrated or given time to leave. This is an issue that requires deep deliberation and a display of the humanism that has always characterized Islam.

“16. Educated Jews and experts in the areas of medicine, engineering, technology, and civilian and military industry should be retained [in Palestine] for some time and should not be allowed to leave and take with them the knowledge and experience that they acquired while living in our land and enjoying its bounty, while we paid the price for all this in humiliation, poverty, sickness, deprivation, killing and arrests.

“17. The return of the refugees must be prepared for gradually, by coordinating in advance with the host countries and establishing temporary absorption centers near the borders with these countries. In this interim period, [the refugees] will register with the census bureau and be issued identity cards, and the Law of Return will be applied to them.

“18. The minute ‘Israel’ collapses, the interim government’s security apparatuses must put their hands on the data regarding the agents of the occupation in Palestine, in the region and [throughout] the world, and [discover] the names of the recruiters, Jewish and non-Jewish, in the country and abroad. This is invaluable information that must not be lost, [for] using this information we can purge Palestine and the Arab and Islamic homeland of the hypocrite scum that spread corruption in the land. This important information will enable us to pursue the fleeing criminals who massacred our people.

“19. A guide book must be compiled explaining the mechanism for repatriating all the refugees who wish to return, and the international community must be charged to do its duty of helping in their repatriation and in realizing the plans for absorbing them in their cities. Wealthy Palestinians must be encouraged to contribute [to the repatriation project] through housing, employment, and investment activity.

“20. When the campaign for the liberation of Palestine begins, the Palestinian fighters will be too busy to secure Palestine’s resources. This means that there will be others not engaged in warfare but possessing physical and mental abilities and the required training who will be recruited to popular committees which can be called ‘guard teams.’ These will comprise men over 40 years of age, as well as women, Palestinians from inside and outside Palestine, whose main job will be to secure the resources of the land and monitor them. They will be trained and then assigned to [different] work teams. Each team will familiarize itself with the institutions and resources it must secure, and record their [status] in an application that will upload [the information] into a central database, part of an administrative system coordinated with the military commander. Preparations for this will begin right now, first of all in the Gaza Strip.

“In sum, the time has come to act. Preparations for the liberation of Palestine began with the spirit of liberation that emanated from this conference, and from the preparations of the fighters whose souls yearn to liberate the land of Palestine and its holy places. We are headed for the victory that Allah promised his servants: ‘O you who have believed, if you support Allah , He will support you and plant firmly your feet [Quran 47:7]’; “They will say, ‘When is that?’ Say, ‘Perhaps it will be soon.’ [Quran 17:51].”

The Promise of the Hereafter conference, sponsored by Al-Sinwar (Source: Palsawa.com, September 30, 2021)

Al-Sinwar’s Statements At The “Promise Of The Hereafter” Conference: Palestine’s Liberation From The Sea To The River Is The Heart Of Hamas’s Strategic Vision

Statements by Yahyah Al-Sinwar, delivered at the Promise of the Hereafter conference by Hamas political bureau member Kamal Abu Aoun, underlined that “the battle for the liberation and the return to Palestine has become closer now than ever before.” Al-Sinwar emphasized the importance of preparing for what was to come, giving as an example the Sword of Jerusalem battle – i.e. the May 2021 Hamas-Israel conflict – which, he said, “did not suddenly break out… rather, the resistance had prepared for it with years of planning, training, and military and intelligence development.” Noting that “the conflict can end only with the implementation of the promise of victory and control that Allah gave us – that our people will live with dignity in its independent state with Jerusalem as its capital. To this end, we are working hard and making many efforts on the ground and in its depths, in the heart of the sea, and in the heights of the heavens… We [can already] see with our eyes the [imminent] liberation and therefore we are preparing for what will come after it…”

He added: “Liberation is the heart of Hamas’s strategic vision, that speaks of the full liberation of Palestine from the sea to the river, the Palestinian refugees’ return to their homeland, and the establishment of a Palestinian state with full sovereignty over its lands, with Jerusalem as its capital… We are sponsoring this conference because it is in line with our assessment that victory is nigh.”[9]

Hamas political bureau member Mahmoud Al-Zahhar referred to the battle of the End of Days, saying in an interview with the Gaza Filastin daily that the Palestinian people and the entire Islamic nation stood at the beginning of a final battle in which Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan must participate. He added that “their participation will finish off the occupation entity in a single day.” The battle of the End of Days will, he said, be a bigger and more intense version of the May 2021 Sword of Jerusalem battle and that “Hamas’s dispute with the plan of [Palestinian Authority President] Mahmoud ‘Abbas and Fatah is that they are settling for the western side of Palestine being for the Jews and the eastern side for the Palestinians – what is known as the two-state solution… We must not relinquish a single inch of our land.”[10]

Palestinian Islamic Jihad Official At The “Promise Of The Hereafter” Conference: The Zionist Entity’s End Is Mentioned In The Quran

In statements on behalf of the National and Islamic Forces, Palestinian Islamic Jihad official Khader Habib said at the conference: “The resistance is engaged in an existential conflict with the Israeli occupation, and it will emerge victorious, as promised by Allah.” He added: “The only conflict which the Quran discusses in detail is the conflict between us and the Zionist enterprise, which is the pinnacle of evil on the global level.” Calling on the Palestinians to be prepared for the ramifications of the divine victory, he noted that the end of the Zionist entity is mentioned in the Quran, and is certain and credible.[11]

Conference Chairman: Israel’s Disappearance Will Be An Historic Event; We Have A Registry Of Israeli Apartments, Institutions, And Resources

Also at the conference, conference chairman Kanaan Obeid explained: “The aim of establishing ‘The Promise of the Hereafter’ institute in 2014 was to act to implement in every way the vision of the phase that will follow liberation – with regard to the economy, politics, security, and society.” Stating that “liberating the Gaza Strip from the occupation in 2005 was an experience of liberation, and we learned a lesson from it – particularly when the resources of the [abandoned Israeli] settlements [in Gaza] were lost,” he added that following this, “we said [to ourselves] that there is no escape from establishing an institution that will be in charge of preparations and of drawing up the plans for the post-liberation stage.”

He added: “We have a registry of the numbers of Israeli apartments and institutions, educational institutions and schools, gas stations, power stations, and sewage systems, and we have no choice but to get ready to manage them… We believe that the liberation [will come] within a few years, [and] that the disappearance of Israel will be an unprecedented historic event on the regional and global levels will have global ramifications.”[12] He also called on the Palestinians “get rid of with the [Israeli] shekel, because it will have zero value – just as the occupation will have zero value.”[13]

[1] The name apparently originates in Quran 17:104: “And We said thereafter unto the Children of Israel, ‘Dwell in the land. And when the promise of the Hereafter comes to pass, We shall bring you as a mixed assembly.'”

[2] Al-Ayyam (Palestinian Authority), September 6, 2021.

[3] Safa.ps, September 30, 2021.

[4] According to Islamic tradition, the Pact of ‘Umar was signed between the Second Caliph ‘Umar Bin Al-Khattab and Sophronius, the Christian patriarch of Jerusalem, upon the Islamic conquest of the city in 638.

[5] Apparently a reference to Salah Al-Din’s decision upon his conquest of Jerusalem to allow Christians and Jews to reside in the city under Islamic rule.

[6] Article 2b of this convention states that “‘succession of states’ means the replacement of one state by another in the responsibility for the international relations of territory.”

[7] Legal.un.org/ilc/texts/instruments/english/conventions/1_1_1969.pdf.

[8] The Palestinian Junayh (also called the Eretz-Israeli funt or lira) was the currency of Mandatory Palestine.

[9] Palinfo.com, Shehabnews.com, September 30, 2021.

[10] Filastin (Gaza), September 30, 2021.

[11] Shehabnews.com, September 30, 2021.

[12] Shehabnews.com, September 30, 2021.

[13] Filastin (Gaza), September 30, 2021.

Mama Mia! The enduring appeal of ᗅᗺᗷᗅ

Paul Hemphill Leave a comment

Fifty years ago, in April 1974, a quartet unknown outside its native Sweden – hardly a musical powerhouse in those days – won the celebrated (yet much maligned by “cool” folk and by progressives who view it as the epitome of capitalism and bad taste) Eurovision Song Contest. The rest, as we say, is pop history. In this age of historical illiteracy, most people today equate Waterloo with ABBA rather than with Napoleon Bonaparte.

I’d watched Eurovision since 1959, when Britain won Eurovision for the very first time – the very straight and formally attired Pearl Carr and Teddy Johnson singing the twee and tweeting Sing Sing Sing Little Birdie, in 1959. I watched Britain win again a few years later with Sandy Shaw and Lulu. But during the early seventies, I was without television and therefore missed the televisual feast of melody and harmony and of costumes that David Bowie would not have been seen dead in – it is said that the seventies was the decade that fashion forgot, and most critics would say that much of the blame for that could be dumped on the singing Swedes’ doorstep.

I confess that I was late in coming to ABBA. The late seventies and early eighties were eventful but distracting times for me personally, I’d heard many of the songs, but was had never really taken much notice, until, one in about 1985, whilst contemplating what it was that made a perfect pop song, I bought a CD of ABBA’s greatest hits.

It was a case of “do you hear the songs, Fernando?”

As a tribute to this now enduring but now virtual quartet, but I can’t better a recent article, republished below, by British author Giles Smith. Read on after the music. As an afterthought, if you’d like to use the iconic reversed B, but don’t know how, cut and paste it now: ᗅᗺᗷᗅ

For other posts on music in In That Howling Infinite, see Soul Food – music and musicians

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/weekend-australian-magazine/thank-you-for-the-music-how-abbas-appeal-finally-became-mainstream/news-story/4199e10316fb173ef966293117734a54

When did daggy old ABBA become pop demigods?

Loving ABBA was once a love that dared not speak its name – certainly not among 13-year-old boys in the playground. But 50 years after Eurovision victory ABBA is finally supercool.

By Giles Smith, The Weekend Australian, 11th May 2024

ABBA performs during the Eurovision Song Contest 1974. Giles Smith, at home in England, is watching on with his mum and dad. Picture: Olli Lindeborg
ABBA performs during the Eurovision Song Contest 1974. Picture: Olli LindeborgIt is Britain at the dawn of 1974, and things aren’t looking that great. Energy prices are through the roof. Strikes abound. Production is in decline and people are getting battered by galloping inflation and a soaring cost of living. The governing Conservative Party is badly split over trading arrangements with are through the roof. Strikes abound. Production is in decline and people are getting battered by galloping inflation and a soaring cost of living. The governing Conservative Party is badly split over trading arrangements with Europe, politicians on the far right are enjoying disproportionate levels of media attention, and the country will be asked to vote in two general elections in this single year – a level of political instability unknown in this country since 1910. Familiar? Yes, I know. Plus, extreme weather events are forecast: storms, floods and even tornadoes.

Embattled Prime Minister Edward Heath declares a fuel-saving “Three-Day Work Order” from New Year’s Day, ­restricting industry to three days per week – kind of “working from home”, but without the work. The Order will stay in place until March 7.

Meanwhile, on billboards and in leaflets, an “SOS” campaign is urging people to “Switch Off Something”, there are power cuts, and the national speed limit has been lowered from 70mph to 50mph in order to conserve petrol.

Swedish pop group ABBA in 1974. Picture: Olle Lindeborg
ABBA in 1974. Picture: Olle Lindeborg

Amid this general slide backwards, a feeling is spreading that Britain in general, and England in particular, can’t do anything properly any more – apart, possibly, from football hooliganism, which is about to enter a particularly busy period. So is the Irish Republican Army, whose mainland bombing campaign will, in the coming months, produce explosions at Westminster Hall, the Tower of London, and pubs in Guildford, Woolwich and Birmingham. If the fabric of society holds, the coming summer will at least offer the diversion of a football World Cup in West Germany – but not for England, who have failed to qualify.

It’s not all doom and gloom, though. On Saturday April 6, in Brighton and live on television throughout Europe, the UK will host the 19th Eurovision Song Contest. I am spending this particular Saturday night – like pretty much every other night, actually – watching TV in the company, more or less, of my parents.

I say “more or less” because it’s fairly obvious that the only one who’ll be fully concentrated on the screen throughout tonight’s protracted spectacular (subsequent programs may overrun, cautions our Cliff-Richard-fronted copy of the Radio Times) is going to be me. My mother, typically, with an anglepoise lamp ablaze beside her armchair, will be devoting her energies to creating one of the patchwork quilts that she seems to be producing in industrial quantities in this period. My father, equally typically, will be dividing his attention between the screen, a newspaper, and the backs of his eyelids.

After victory at Eurovision the Swedish quartet stroll hand-in-hand among daffodils in Hyde Park, London. Picture: Anwar Hussein
After victory at Eurovision in Brighton. Picture: Anwar Hussein

I alone in this room will be achieving the state of trancelike engrossment which Eurovision no doubt merits – though not, I should admit, because I am helplessly in thrall to the contest’s allure, but because I learned a long time ago in this sitting room that any discernible lapse in concentration on my part will automatically invite an instruction to go to bed. And at this point in my life, the avoidance of bed is essentially the mission every evening. (The contest, incidentally, is starting enticingly late for the semi-professional bed-avoider: 9.30pm.) Anyway, whether I make it to the end or not, Eurovision is on, which means that I am about to have my first meeting with Björn, Benny, ­Agnetha and Frida.

“And we move now across into Sweden,” says David Vine, the BBC’s voice; he usually commentates on skiing and snooker, but he’s on secondment to the Brighton Dome tonight.

Here they come then – the ABBA group. There’s a couple of bars of galloping guitar, bundled together with a brightly chiming piano, and as it plays, Agnetha and Frida come barrelling down the catwalk from the back of the stage and into our lives, microphone cables paying out behind them.

“My my!” they sing, and it’s as if the show has suddenly shifted a gear and somebody somewhere has stepped on the accelerator.

These days we are entirely comfortable with ABBA’s ubiquity, their presence in the air we breathe. I pluck this randomly from my own experience: in the summer of 2023, wandering around a market in France, I heard a stallholder break briefly into song while looking for change for a customer. “Money, money, money!” he sang. Then I went along the road and had ­coffee in a cafe where Knowing Me, Knowing You came on. Driving back to where we were staying, I stopped in at a supermarket and dropped food into a trolley to a backdrop of Take a Chance on Me.

Three casual encounters with the music of ABBA in the space of about 90 minutes, then. Just occasionally, as you move around Europe at this point in history, you can be forgiven for concluding that it’s ABBA’s world and we only live in it. What gets harder to remember is that it hasn’t always been this way. It would surprise many of the people happily thronging the ABBA Voyage show in London, unselfconsciously browsing the ABBA sweatshirts and ABBA key fobs and ABBA tea trays in the arena’s store, to hear that a love for ABBA was once a love that dared not speak its name – certainly not among 13-year-olds in a school playground. This author – with his carefully concealed copy of the 1975 album ABBA on ­cassette – can personally attest to that.

The fact is, for a long time it seemed that where ABBA had come from – both in the sense of Sweden and of the 1974 Eurovision Song Contest, where they first came to prominence – had placed a tight restriction on what the band and their music could ever be or mean to people. Almost three years after they sang Waterloo in Brighton, a review in the Guardian of a rare ABBA live performance in London described them wanly as “four Euro-persons” who made “elegant Eurorock pop”, and remarked by way of conclusion that it was “nice to be able to put four faces to a pleasant sound”. There is, of course, no term in the critical lexicon more damning than “pleasant”. As for the term “Euro“, it comes up again and again in writing about ABBA in this period and is rarely meant positively either.

Two years after that, in 1979, the American rock critic Robert Christgau, writing in the Village Voice, didn’t even try to gild it: “We have met the enemy,” he wrote, after experiencing ABBA in concert, “and they are them.”

Bjorn Ulvaeus, Agnetha Faltskog, Frida Lyngstad and Benny Andersson wear kimonos in 1976. Picture: RB/Redferns/Getty Images
Bjorn Ulvaeus, Agnetha Faltskog, Frida Lyngstad and Benny Andersson 1976.
Picture: RB/Redferns/Getty Images

As ABBA tried to make their way in the world, it rapidly emerged that the Eurovision Song Contest was a unique kind of springboard that could also function as a trap. Blasted high off that Brighton stage, ABBA would look around for months and years afterwards and discover that somehow all the scenery had tiresomely come with them and was threatening to drag them down again. So: a Swedish act, a Eurovision act … ABBA and their defenders would be a long time struggling to answer the band’s repeated arraignment on these twin charges, both of which, of course, had the disadvantage from the defence’s point of view of being completely undeniable.

“Personally, I hate what they stand for,” a critic wrote in 1979, “and think they are brilliant.” Here at least was evidence of a thaw. But it was also evidence that even defenders of ABBA for a while had to tie themselves in knots of equivocation. So great … and yet so cheesy. Even their most fervent admirers would find themselves acknowledging sometimes that there was something confounding about ABBA, something that was just beyond the grasp.

ABBA are the band you know best that you barely know. Of course, there are ABBA fans and superfans whose commitment to the study of Agnetha, Björn, Benny and Frida in all their manifestations is both clarifying and humbling. But in the slightly less specialised and more ad hoc place where ABBA intersect with the general listener, it’s clear that a certain amount of cloudiness about the band frequently persists.

Somewhat distant even at the blazing height of their fame, the band were only fully and openly embraced by the world some years after they had, to all intents and purposes, ceased to exist. Consequently, today, familiarity with ABBA’s music outstrips familiarity with anything else about them. The band’s members are, by any definition of the term, superstars, yet in 2024, even in circles where ABBA are adored, a confident and unerring ability to know your Benny from your Björn – or even, in some cases, your Agnetha from your Frida – ­betokens ABBA-knowledge at practically PhD levels. We know, perhaps, that they were two couples whose marriages came apart yet who somehow kept the band on the road even after that, channelling the pain of separation in timeless songs such as The Winner Takes It Alland Knowing Me, Knowing You. But Björn wrote the lyric for the second of those songs two years before he separated from Agnetha and when they were together, seemingly happy and enjoying the arrival of their second child. And Benny and Frida didn’t get married until after Björn and Agnetha had decided to split up.

“Personally, I hate what they stand for,” a critic wrote in 1979, “and think they are brilliant.” Picture: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
“Personally, I hate what they stand for,” a critic wrote in 1979, “and think they are brilliant.” Picture: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

The truth is, we don’t know much, and most of what we think we know is wrong or ­improvised or conjecture or (most frequently of all) projection. Glory in its fullest form came to ABBA posthumously, when they had stepped down from the stage and out of the studio; and so, with a purity which is rare in the history of pop – and practically impossible in the social media age – Agnetha, Björn, Benny and Frida burn most brightly in our minds as a set of bombproof songs which a very large number of us appear tirelessly happy to hear. The songs, we do know. But how do we know them?

To all intents and purposes, ABBA finished being a band in 1982. They had eight years together as recording and performing artists – about the same as The Beatles. Then, albeit without ever making an official ­announcement that they were done, they withdrew, apparently exhausted or wrung out to some extent, and tired of each other’s company, and moved on to other things – solo albums in the case of Agnetha and Frida, the composition of musicals in the case of Björn and Benny. At that point, ABBA were widely felt to have outlived their purpose and, more than that, were regarded in many quarters as irredeemably naff.

There is no image of the members of the band on the cover of ABBA Gold – the 19-song compilation album put together by the Polydor label in 1992, 11 years after the band’s last set of studio recordings – because the album was carefully market-researched in advance of its release and the feedback from the focus groups was that although people were potentially interested in buying a record of ABBA’s hits, and more than happy and able to nominate the songs they wouldn’t mind hearing on it – Take a Chance on Me, The Name of the Game, Super Trouper – they didn’t especially want to own something with the band’s faces prominently displayed on it. So the label went with simple gold lettering on a black background. Such were the feelings around ABBA in 1992.

Yet it was ABBA Gold which began to change the climate around the band, ushering in what we can now regard as ABBA’s renaissance period, helped along, somewhat randomly, by the Australian films Priscilla, Queen of the Desert and Muriel’s Wedding, both released in 1994 – and in due course by the 1999 jukebox musical Mamma Mia! and, in 2008, the first of the two films that arose from it.

       At that juncture, a decade into the 21st century, ABBA, once presumed dead and buried, were arguably more alive than they had ever been. ABBA Gold has now sold more than 32 million copies worldwide and is behind only Queen’s Greatest Hits as the UK’s best-selling record of all time.

And then, as 2021 ended, almost out of nowhere, the band re-emerged among us – not just with one final, completely unexpected and time-defying burst of new music, but in the form of the magnetically engaging and mysteriously moving Voyage stage show, which was nothing less than a complete re-imagining of the live concert experience and which revealed the band as a set of idealised, computer-generated versions of themselves which were somehow at once entirely them and not them at all.

At this point, approaching 42 years since their last formally ticketed concert and with the band members now well into their seventies and apparently entirely indifferent to the idea of performing together in the flesh, ABBA had probably never been more prominent – and had arguably never been more ABBA.

ABBA in Melbourne, Australia get a rock star welcome from fans.
ABBA  get a rock star welcome from fans in Melbourne, Australia, 1977

“I’ve been reading you all my life,” a gushing fan once told the author Samuel Beckett.

“You must be very tired,” Beckett replied.

Well, here I am, a full half-century after ­Waterloo, and in a position to say much the same to the members of ABBA, were I ever to meet them. “I’ve been hearing you all my life,” I could say, “or for nearly all of it that I can remember. And no, actually, before you ask, I’m not tired. Or not of ABBA, anyway.”

Because what would it even mean, in 2024, to say you were tired of ABBA, except by way of admitting that you had run out of patience with pop music altogether, or that pop music had run out of patience with you?

What’s certainly true is that, over the 50 years since Waterloo, ABBA have been liked by pretty much every kind of person and in pretty much every way that it’s possible to like a pop group. They have been consumed in a hurry as sugary pop stars and appreciated soberly as abiding musical craftspeople of exceptional ­talent. They have been enjoyed ironically and enjoyed entirely sincerely. They have been a guilty pleasure and an utterly unashamed one. Their records have managed to define whole periods and to slip free of history altogether, with the result that, in 2024, their songs are warmly familiar both to 1970s nostalgistes, hungry to revisit their childhoods, and people who weren’t even born when the 20th century ended. They have been feted alike as exuberant gay icons and as the reliable providers of pan-generational dance music for heterosexual wedding receptions. Their music knows the unequivocal love of the very best among us, and yet has also been used to soundtrack lockdown-busting piss-ups in Downing St (the ­notorious “ABBA party” of November 2020, about which Benny Andersson said, with an understandable instinct for dissociation, “You can’t call it an ABBA party. It’s a [Boris] ­Johnson party”).

Souvenir edition the Daily Mirror celebrating of Abba’s arrival in Australia.
Souvenir edition the Daily Mirror celebrating of Abba’s arrival in Australia.
My My! ABBA Through the Ages by Giles Smith.
My My! ABBA Through the Ages by Giles Smith.

     In this wildly elastic range, they outperform even The Beatles. Certainly, it is given to vanishingly few groups to have been so many things to so many people at so many different times. It is given to even fewer to have been so many things to so many people while the group’s members simply sat in their various houses for four decades doing nothing (or, at least, nothing ABBA-related).

And that, surely, is the most delicious detail in the deeply satisfying narrative of ABBA’s eventual widespread vindication. All of the things for which they were routinely teased and dismissed along the way eventually turned into things for which they could be uncomplicatedly celebrated and loved.

All Björn, Benny, Agnetha and Frida had to do in order to be fully and resoundingly appreciated was … nothing. They just had to stand by until the rest of us came around.

Here I am, 44 years later, at ABBA Voyage, for the second time, watching not even ABBA but a simulation of ABBA sing this song about heartache, scars, grieving and the longed-for release from grieving. I’m also watching a very artfully realised total eclipse of the Sun, which is the backdrop for this number, the room glowing orange and then slowly falling dark as the song plays, which is quite something.

And, you see, the thing is, everyone at ABBA Voyage sings along to the chorus of Chiquitita. That’s the point of it – they all just pile in. They pile in on it like you wouldn’t believe, raising their arms and swaying.

Chiquitita – the power of the singing, the ­defiance of grief in it, the iron nature of its ­consolation, there is stuff in that song that I wouldn’t and couldn’t have got to with any amount of effort in 1979.

Bjorn, Agnetha, Anni-Frid and Benny attend the first performance of ABBA's Voyage in London in 2022. Picture: Nicky J Sims/Getty Images
Bjorn, Agnetha, Anni-Frid and Benny attend the first performance of ABBA’s Voyage, London  2022. Picture: Nicky J Sims/Getty Images

And it is just so extraordinary how this ­manifestly artificial show ends up evoking so much in the way of feelings. In an interview, ­co-producer Ludvig Andersson ­attributed that ostensibly unlikely outcome to the blurring of “the borderline between real and fantasy worlds”, and how the show’s peculiar position between those borders “triggers ­feelings about youth and ageing, mortality and immortality”.

And there seems to me to be a lot of truth in that, and especially at this exact point in the show, when the Sun is disappearing before our eyes and the audience has got hold of that ­chorus, and I mean, really got hold of it, and the whole place is a sea of arms in this gradually darkening room, and two of my brothers are dead and, oh, for god’s sake, now I’m crying in the middle of ABBA’s bloody Chiquitita.

My My! ABBA Through the Ages (Simon & Schuster, $34.99) by Giles Smith

How the jihadi tail wags the leftist dog

Paul Hemphill Leave a comment

… 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.

American author Lionel Shriver, Unherd  30th April 2024

Luxury beliefs and historical illiteracy 

From “You want it darker?” … Gaza and the devil that never went away …

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.

For more on Israel and Palestine in In That Howling Infinite, see Middle East Miscellany. See also, Total war in an urban landscape – Israel’s military quandary, and The Calculus of Carnage – the mathematics of Muslim on Muslim mortality

America’s Leftist Literati Fetishizes Hamas Brutality

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

Arash Azizi, Haaretz Apr 18, 2024
Relatives of victims of the October 7 attacks carried out by Hamas visit at an installation bearing the photos of their loved ones who were killed or kidnapped during the event, at the site of the Nova festival in Re'im in southern Israel in April.
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 a captured Israeli civilian, Noa Argamani, on a motorcycle from southern Israel, in the Gaza Strip during the Hamas attack on October 7.
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
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 an op-ed in The Guardian by writer Naomi Klein published October 11, and the one on the below is as it appeared after it was edited following pushback.
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.
The very adjective “exhilarated,” which had already been used by at least one other American academic in the days after October 7, is quite telling.
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