12 April 2024
Seductive Violence: Grappling with misplaced hope and moral collapse on the radical Left
I find myself especially disturbed by the fact that so many Leftists have allowed themselves to be manipulated by a spectacle of violence. Israel-Palestine has long been a global inflection point, but there is something new about the way in which many otherwise humanistic and justice-oriented people have embraced Hamas, an organization responsible for raping, torturing, and killing over 700 unarmed civilians, including Arabs and foreign nationals. In our quest for justice for Palestinians, something has gone terribly wrong.
In the aftermath of the attack, both the Israeli government and many Leftists were eager to conflate Hamas with Palestinians. In one memorable conversation, an erstwhile comrade remarked that “even those who would condemn Oct 7” were shocked by Israel’s brutal retaliation. When I clarified that I, too, am one of “those” who condemn rape, torture, and killing of civilians, she scoffed. Oct 7 was a reflexive “outcry of the oppressed,” and therefore, judging Oct 7 would be akin to “judging physics or judging the wind.” It did not occur to her to question whether oppressed people have moral agency or whether the orchestrators of Oct 7 were indeed “oppressed.”
Callous disregard for human life has become the norm. As details emerged about the slaughter, one Canadian activist and father mused on social media about the 36 child victims. Speculating that slave revolts in the 18th and 19th centuries must have killed their share of kids, he determined that these killings were negligible in the face of “world historic necessity.” Similar appeals to “world history” are now routinely deployed in support of Iran’s Islamist regime as they systematically execute political dissidents, as well as Shia Islamists in Yemen as they attack global shipping vessels primarily manned by sailors from Southeast Asia.
These days, when Oct 7 is acknowledged at all, it is denied, dismissed, and minimised. To suggest that Hamas should still be actively opposed is to invite hyperbolic accusations that you are a “Zionist” and “support genocide.” Yet the spectacle of violence that Hamas initiated on Oct 7 is far from over. In 2023, journalists in Gaza had been documenting historically low approval ratings for Hamas for months prior to Oct 7. Demonstrators risked their lives in the streets to call for the end of Hamas rule. In their own public statements, Hamas spokespeople living far from the frontlines of war have clearly articulated their intentions to “martyr” as many Palestinians as necessary in order to destroy Israel and establish an Islamist government in the Holy Land. This “leadership” orchestrated “Operation Al-Aqsa Flood” not to “liberate” ordinary Palestinians; it did so to sacrifice them. The appalling conditions of civilians in Gaza, including starvation, lack of basic sanitation, and death at the hands of the IDIF, are also part of this spectacle.
Why can’t well-meaning Leftists see that by refusing to criticise Hamas and its allies, they only perpetuate the violent oppression of Palestinians? Why are secular, queer, feminist, and anti-racist humanists lining up behind far-right religious fundamentalist-nationalists? For decades, Indigenous liberation activists in the US and Canada have struggled to assert the framework of “decolonization” as a life-affirming transformation in social and ecological relations. Now, it is settlers themselves who are popularising an inverted notion of decolonization as violent retribution. Moreover, they do so by appealing to the same “historical necessity” that settlers used to justify genocide against Indigenous peoples in the first place. Why are ordinarily intelligent and compassionate people once again believing that some vague, greater arc of history can justify indiscriminate massacre?
Perhaps only history can fully answer these questions. Nonetheless, it seems to me that it has something to do with misplaced hope. With the increasingly desperate situation of the world, exhausted Leftists are feeling suffocated by their own helplessness. In the absence of serious alternatives, these folks have come to indulge in fantasies that make them feel powerful. We hope we can cut through our impotence using spectacular force. Once extraordinary violence grabs the world’s attention, the reasoning goes, then the real work of change can begin.
Such a worldview only holds together if a straight, bold line demarcates oppressors and oppressed. As the authors of Left Renewal so effectively show, this dualistic or “campist” schema of global history erases long-standing divisions of wealth and power [within the Global South], including state and military power, regional imperialism, and countless other injustices. By labelling social groups or identities as the problem, we abandon our duty to dismantle capitalism, the state, racism, and hetero-patriarchy as systems. And what better oppressor to target than one who is, in fact, quite vulnerable? Western antisemitism portrays Jews as super-powerful and, therefore, responsible for the violence against them. This distorted thinking underpins the idea that Israelis, in their entirety, as a nation, are disposable in the name of “world history.”
Global powers such as Iran, Russia, and China happily exploit such oversimplifications to legitimise and obscure their crimes. As an American friend in China recently remarked in regard to the genocide of Uyghurs in the province of Xinjiang: “There is a perverse American exceptionalism in believing that we are the masters of evil.”
Campist worldviews also thrive upon erasure. By regarding all Israelis, without qualification or exception, as “settler-colonists,” Americans project their own world-historic crimes onto millions of Mizrahi Jews, “indigenous” peoples whose existence most Americans are completely oblivious of. And by attributing Palestine’s “colonisation” to Ashkenazi Jews alone, they absolve powerful landowners and officers of the British and Ottoman empires, who were also responsible for Palestinian disenfranchisement, particularly when it came to the sale of land. Finally, this view inflates the power of Holocaust refugees who were often forced to choose between being sent to Israel or languishing in displaced persons camps, where conditions were sometimes only marginally better than in Nazi ghettos. Among these refugees were even anti-state Zionists, who opposed the creation of the state of Israel and instead advocated for a common Jewish-Arab confederation.
Virtually all nation-states commit injustices in their process of national formation. Without diminishing the suffering of Palestinians from the Nakba to the present, we must resist distorted narratives that deny Israelis the same democratic rights and responsibilities as the citizens of any other nation.
Weaponized Western ignorance and indifference about the Middle East is a broader problem. In recent years, democratic revolutionaries in Northern Syria and Southern Turkey have suffered high casualties in the fight to stop Turkish forces and Islamic fundamentalists from committing genocide against Kurds and other minorities. Persistent calls for support, including the cessation of F-16 fighter jet sales to Turkey or issuing a no-fly zone, have gone largely unanswered by Western comrades who erroneously regard them as “puppets” of the United States. In Iran, the Islamic regime has recently executed hundreds of young men and women for advancing basic human rights in the Women, Life, Freedom movement. Yet this blatant, brutal repression has not been met by an international outcry on the Left. From Iran and Syria to Afghanistan, Turkey, Egypt, and Iraq, radically democratic activists have put their lives on the line for freedom and justice, only to be ignored. For those of us who follow democratic activism, it can almost seem like many Western activists take pride in not caring about the Middle East or its unique history and dynamics.
I don’t think this is what Western Leftists intend. I believe, fundamentally, in their goodness. But we have to back off this cliff where the seductive power of violence distorts our thinking and leads us to betray our principles. When we assume that history is on our side as a matter of course, we become capable of condoning – and even committing – unthinkable acts. I pray that history brings these folks back to their senses and they come to see that Islamist terrorist violence is a subversion of Palestinian liberation, not a way of championing it.
What would a comprehensive, democratic reconstruction of Gaza look like? How can reparations for 70 years of displacement, subordination, and violence be made to all Palestinians? Will the region be called Palestine, Israel, or by some other name?
Western Leftists cannot answer these questions. Nor can Likud, Mafdal, Otzma Yehudit, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, or any other authoritarian entity. Only a grassroots alliance of peace-loving Palestinians and Israelis can author a common democratic future for the region.