Three Body Blood Libel Narrative

 

Cixin Liu's Three Body Problem is one of my favorite works of science fiction. I have just started watching the Netflix adaptation so I do not yet have a firm opinion of it. One of the things that I admire about the book is its exploration of the insidious power of propaganda. At the beginning of the novel, we are treated to a mob of Cultural Revolution students calling for the blood of a professor for teaching the "heretical" theory of relativity. This raises the question of how one goes about creating such fanatics. We are given a possible answer later in the story with the Trisolaran video game. 

(Spoiler Alert)

The alien Trisolarans, in order to prepare the way for their invasion of Earth, are recruiting human followers. Their method is through a video game. The game appears innocent at first. What players do not realize until they are well advanced into the game is that they have been learning the history of the Trisolarans and that these Trisolarans are not fiction. Having absorbed Trisolaran propaganda, the human players come to believe that the beauty of the game indicates that the Trisolarans must be virtuous and that it would be a good thing if they took over the Earth. To be clear, what makes the Trisolarans so interesting as villains is that, throughout the series, the reader is repeatably tempted to believe that the Trisolarans actually are good at heart, despite what they do, because of their artistic talent. 

The obsessed game players come to form a society to help the Trisolarans, the Earth Trisolaris Organization (ETO). Having come to completely identify with the Trisolarians, members of the ETO turn into utter fanatics in their desire to betray humanity. They hate humanity and believe that the only way they can redeem themselves and become truly Trisolaran is by destroying the human race. As such, members of the ETO have this schizophrenic view of the Trisolarans. Much like Jewish supporters of the Palestinians, they simultaneously believe that the Trisolarans will bring about a golden age where both species live in peace together and that the Trisolarans will wipe out humanity because humans do not deserve to live.         

Considering this idea that you can create fanatics by surrounding people with a propaganda narrative, I was struck by the Time review of the series. Normally, you would think that a review of a show based on a book written in Chinese nearly twenty years ago would find no need to bring in contemporary Western politics. Instead, we are treated to the following paragraph:     

What resonates most about the series is its ambivalence about the prospect of an alien civilization annihilating humanity. The Oxford Five’s debate on the matter does seem timely, in a world where, in a state with anti-trans policies, a non-binary teen dies a day after being beaten at school; and the massacre of 1,200 people in one country is answered by the killing of 30,000 people and counting next door. Even without extraterrestrial meddling, scientists’ decades of warnings about the climate crisis didn’t prevent 2023 from setting a record for carbon emissions from fossil fuels.

One is struck by the dishonesty of the claims being made. The student in Oklahoma did not die from injuries sustained in a fight that it seems they started so it is absurd to fault State officials (or, for that matter, Chaya Raichik). Israel is not simply killing people out of revenge. They are attempting to go after members of Hamas who carried out the massacre even as the fact that Hamas has embedded itself among Gazan civilians guarantees that many innocent Gazans will die as well. The main reason why carbon emissions continue to rise is that people outside of the West, particularly in China, have been making economic progress and can now afford cars. 

The point of throwing these comments in the middle of a review is to serve a narrative that closely parallels that of the ETO. There are these terrible people, religious Christians and Zionists, who are out to murder trans-kids and Palestinians. They are also responsible for global warming. Clearly, if we do not form mobs and murder these people, the whole Earth is going to be destroyed. As with all good propaganda, the point is not to make arguments as arguments require evidence and can be countered. What you want is a narrative as you cannot argue with a narrative. It is simply what “everyone” already knows to be true  

In Search of the People (Part II)

(Part I)

The problem for classical Marxists was that workers in the West proved not to be particularly revolutionary at all. They were easily bought off with modest progressive reforms such as shorter hours and better working conditions. They did not suffer alienation in the sense that the very idea of being under the authority of a capitalist did not bother them as long as that capitalist could provide them with ever greater prosperity.

One solution to this problem was Fascism. While we tend to think of Fascism as a right-wing movement, it is important to keep in mind that Mussolini started as a socialist. He then made the perfectly reasonable assumption that he could make socialism palatable in a country like Italy by embracing nationalism and using it to show that the Italian people, as Italians, really did have a revolutionary consciousness. This then led to the acceptance of the Catholic Church as part of the consciousness of the Italian People and even of the bourgeoise, who willingly embraced state control once it was made clear to them that, as Italians, they were not being placed as the villains and their property was not going to be expropriated. (It should be noted that the early Mussolini was not particularly anti-Semitic. Jews had been Italians since the Roman Empire so they were welcomed into the Fascist Party.) From this perspective, it should come as no surprise that Mousellini maintained a high degree of acceptability within leftist circles during his early years. He offered a plausible model for achieving socialist aims by avoiding conflict with the right.  

Marxism's only success in the early twentieth century was Russia, a country that was still transitioning out of an absolute monarchy and still trying to figure out the Industrial Revolution. On top of this, the Czar had managed to bring the entire country to ruin through his disastrous involvement in World War I. So the Bolsheviks managed to seize power by promising basic land reforms to improve the lot of citizens. In the 1920s, it was still plausible to imagine that Marxism would allow the Soviet Union to leapfrog the West and give workers more of the cars and electric appliances that Western workers were beginning to take for granted.

The problem for the Soviet Union was that it was unable to deliver on these economic promises. Furthermore, even trying to outproduce the West in consumer goods would betray the revolution. A worker with a truly revolutionary consciousness would rather labor under the worst horrors of the nineteenth-century factory system as long as it was an agent of the party who was his boss than to enjoy the blessings of Western capitalism if it meant being subjected to a capitalist boss. As such, one had to conclude that the vast majority of Soviet citizens were counterrevolutionaries. Even the seemingly loyal Soviet citizens who honestly believed that the Communist Party could deliver the full abundance of consumer goods had already betrayed the revolution in their hearts. They demonstrated that they did not believe in Communism as a matter of principle. If tomorrow they could be convinced that capitalism could offer more benefits, they would gladly betray the revolution and replace it with capitalism. (Note that this is what essentially happened to the Soviet Union in 1991.)   

This Soviet dilemma explains the Stalinist terror of the 1930s. The attempt to collectivize farms was a failure and led to the deaths of millions, mainly in Ukraine. If you are a good Communist, the explanation for this was that the Ukrainian Kulaks were greedy and sabotaged the plan so they deserved to die. Furthermore, now that we have established that the move toward actual socialism cannot happen unless the population truly develops a socialist consciousness, something most of them lack, the only solution is to declare war on the non-socialist masses in the name of the People. It should be emphasized that, under Stalin, to be guilty of treason, did not require malicious intent. Everyone, particularly those born before 1917, was, by definition, a traitor in spirit. How could it be otherwise if you were born into a capitalist world and instinctually thought in terms of personal benefit? The mark of a traitor was, upon being accused of treason, to deny guilt. Such a person demonstrated that they lacked the proper socialist mindset and still thought in terms of individual actions instead of accepting that they cannot be anything but guilty. The mark of a true socialist believer was to confess and accept any punishment in the hope that this will lead the next generation to develop the necessary socialist consciousness.

Mid and late twentieth-century leftist revolutionaries faced a dilemma. As knowledge of Stalinist atrocities became more widespread, it became harder to openly defend the Soviet Union as any kind of ideal. (This was distinct from taking money from the Soviet Union and working for Soviet interests during the Cold War.) At the same time, Western economic successes made it less likely that urban workers would be willing to risk their unions, pension plans, and welfare benefits on some revolution. As such, leftist revolutionary thought developed along two streams that looked to different groups of discontented individuals to serve as revolutionary classes. These were third-world peasants and members of minority groups in the West.

While classical Marxism had rejected the peasant as a revolutionary class, in the twentieth century they came to be reevaluated. Peasants had the advantage of never being seduced by a capitalist consciousness of individual striving and still maintained a group ethos. Furthermore, while peasants maintained traditional beliefs, outside of Europe and the United States, these were not Orthodox Christian beliefs. Even in Latin America, the Christianity on the ground could assumed to be far enough from Orthodox Christianity that such beliefs could be held up as manifestations of a revolutionary consciousness.

Much as religion suddenly became acceptable when taken out of its Western context, so did nationalism. For example, the nationalism of the North Vietnamese was acceptable as it manifested itself as opposition to imperial powers such as the French and later the Americans. As such, the North Vietnamese demonstrated a revolutionary consciousness and could be counted as a manifestation of the People. Obviously, nationalist movements that were not hostile to the West such as in Poland or Zionism remained illegitimate. Their existence demonstrated that Poles and Israelis lacked a revolutionary consciousness and did not count as part of the People.   

This embrace of nationalism and even religion, despite the fact that these were the things that were supposed to mark someone as a Fascist, eventually led Western leftists to embrace the Arab cause. This started by accepting Arab nationalists such as Nassar but then eventually came to include Islamic fundamentalists such as Khomeini in Iran. From this perspective, the Palestinians became the ultimate “oppressed people.” They combined Arab nationalism with Islam and struggled against Western "Imperialism" by opposing the State of Israel. The destruction and its replacement with Palestine would be the elimination of the Jewish false consciousness of itself as a people and allow for the manifestation of the true Peoplehood of the Palestinians.  

Philo-Semitic Marxists

 

Since I have previously written about Marxist anti-Semitism, I should acknowledge an example of an exception that I have encountered. At the city council meeting, I encountered Laura Garza, who is running for the Senate as part of the Socialist Worker’s Party (SWP). They are Trotskyites, who reject the Soviet Union. They do, though, uphold Cuba as a model.

The SWP platform includes the following:

Defend Israel’s Right to Exist. Condemn the Jew-Hating Pogrom Organized by Hamas and the Iranian Government.

The capitalist regime in Iran and the reactionary forces it backs in Hamas, Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad are enemies not only of the Jews, but of working people of all nationalities. So long as capitalism exists, in times of crisis the rulers will turn to scapegoating Jews to smash the working class as they did in Nazi Germany. The fight for workers power and socialism is the only solution to end the anti-working-class poison of Jew hatred.  

What I find interesting here is that the traditional Rousseauian leftist revolutionary logic of the People and those who are not still applies. Jews are now an embodiment of the People. Even if you are not Jewish, you can join the struggle against anti-Semitism and, by doing so, become part of the People.

By contrast, Iran is not part of the People but is a “capitalist regime.” On the surface, this sounds strange as there is nothing particularly free market about Iran beyond their willingness to tolerate the selling of organs. What should be understood is that capitalism, from a leftist revolutionary perspective, only incidentally has something to do with the philosophy of Adam Smith. The primary meaning of capitalism is simply any “reactionary” ideology that stands in the way of leftist revolutionaries.

Opposing the Ceasefire in Pasadena Before Purim

 

Last night I attended a Pasadena city hall meeting for a vote on a ceasefire resolution for the Israel-Hamas war. (If you look at the photo attached to the article, I am the person standing in the back in a red shirt and orange scarf.) Unfortunately, the ceasefire call passed in the form of a declaration as opposed to a resolution and the language included a mention that the hostages needed to be released. I guess, considering all things, it could have been worse. What truly struck me was how outnumbered we in the pro-Israel camp were, easily 10-1. I have never felt less sure that we can beat these people. 

I will give credit to the pro-Palestinian activists. For the most part, they were remarkably well-disciplined. There were exceptions such as the woman giving pro-Israel speakers the middle finger.

Also, someone went over to me and whispered in my ear: “We are all Hamas.” That being said, clearly, the organizers of the pro-Palestinian group made an effort to make sure that their supporters kept to the rules and did not boo their opponents. In the video, you can even see someone holding up a text on their phone telling people not to boo. I actually thanked one of their organizers for getting his people to quiet down. I even shook his hand. His response was: “I assume you support genocide.” This organizer might be an SOB, but at least he is a polite SOB.

Unfortunately, our opponents are not fools. They understand that, while anger is useful for whipping up people who are already on your side, it turns off precisely the sorts of average people that you need to convince. As Adam Smith argued in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, anger is the emotion that other people have the hardest time empathizing with. The pro-Palestinian speakers offered a tone of moral authority without coming across simply as angry or hateful. Having cute kids coming out to speak certainly did not hurt. (Yes, I assume that the kids were coached and rehearsed their statements. That being said, I have spent enough time in education to appreciate what it takes to get a kid to stand before a crowd and speak clearly.) The biggest ace cards that the pro-Palestinians were able to employ were the large numbers of Jews who went up to the microphone and said things like: “as a Jew who is descended from Holocaust survivors, I denounce the genocide being carried out by the apartheid Zionist state.” Obviously, it is hard to accuse the pro-Palestinians of hating Jews when so many of them are Jewish.

Seeing how badly one-sided the meeting was becoming, I put my name down to speak and was given a minute to address the council. Here is what I said:

It seems clear that, when talking about a ceasefire, quite a few people here mean that Hamas should get the chance to pull another October 7^th. (This got a response from the pro-Palestinians and they were called to order by the council chair.) This Sunday is the Jewish holiday of Purim when we celebrate being saved from the genocidal plot of Haman. I have a message for all the ideological descendants of Haman out there, particularly the Jewish ones. I admit that I am afraid of you. But I also know that, one day, my descendants will laugh at you. Perhaps, we will make cookies shaped like your ears, fill them with jelly, and eat them. The cookies and not your ears.

My basic idea was to make it clear where the moral high ground lies Our opponents are not human rights activists trying to prevent a genocide. On the contrary, their goal is to carry out one themselves. That being said, I did not want to come across as angry. Showing that you have a sense of humor can be an effective tool to humanize yourself in the eyes of your opponents. In contrast to anger, the desire to find humor even in difficult circumstances is something that people easily empathize with. Finally, and I guess this is Chabad having a positive influence on me, I wanted to reach out even to Jews who are so estranged from their Judaism as to willingly collaborate with people plotting to carry out another Holocaust. Perhaps, those who did not get my joke about hamantaschen will be intrigued enough to ask someone for an explanation. They might even come to realize that Judaism is far richer than simply spouting leftism and calling it tikkun olam. For example, Judaism has you teach your children to make a blessing on hamantaschen and share some with your neighbors.   

There is the old joke that the essence of Jewish holidays can be summarized as they tried to kill us, they failed, let's eat. Purim takes this a step further. Haman tried to kill us, he failed and we will remember his efforts not as tragedy but as farce. More than killing Haman, we get our revenge on him, Mel Brooks style, by making him ridiculous. We dress up like him, get so drunk that we confuse him with Mordechai, and, yes, we eat cookies shaped like his ears.    

In Search of the People (Part I)

We have previously discussed the role of Motte and Bailey tactics in leftist revolutionary thought. Words like critical thinking, education, racism, oppression, and genocide do not mean what most people think they mean. Specifically, they have nothing to do with physical violence, teaching people to read and think for themselves. Instead, these words are simply reduced to matters of whether you support the leftist revolutionary agenda. If you do not, then you are guilty of racism, oppression, and genocide. If you are a parent or teacher, you are guilty of failing to educate children and teach them critical thinking skills. Because of this, leftist revolutionaries are justified in using violence against you.

Here, I would like to turn to the word “people.” Within classical liberal thought, people are important in the sense that everyone should have equal rights and be equal before the law regardless of their birth or personal wealth. For leftist revolutionaries, while they pretend to support the masses, in actuality the People are those who support leftist revolutionaries as opposed to the vast majority of individuals who live in a country who are alienated from themselves and suffer from false consciousness. This has important implications for democracy. Democracy, for leftist revolutionaries, is about not elections and rule by the majority of voters. On the contrary, a country like North Korea is a true people’s democracy as Kim Jong Un represents the true consciousness of the People. This notion of the people goes back to Rousseau, who had even greater contempt for the masses than even Plato.   

Much of the story of leftist revolutionary movements can be seen as a search for the People. Leftist revolutionary intellectuals can never be more than a small percentage of any society. In order to seize power, they have needed to hold up some larger group and pretend to rule in their name. This has meant finding a group that not only is physically oppressed and demands reforms but is so alienated from the rest of society that their needs can only be satisfied through a complete revolution.

Consider the example of the French Revolution. The French political system in 1789 was in need of reform such as the elimination of feudal privileges and that the monarch should share power with a national assembly. These were things for which there was widespread support throughout French society. The problem for the French Revolution was what to do after the low-hanging fruit was dealt with in the summer of 1789. There was no national consensus for any truly revolutionary changes. As such, the radicals of the revolution ran into stiff opposition not just from aristocrats who fled abroad and supported foreign invasion to restore the ancient regime, but also from peasants. 

This challenge to the Revolution helped bring about the Reign of Terror. Robespierre was faced with the problem that for all his talk about the People, the majority of actual people in France were quite counter-revolutionary. As a Rousseauian, Robespierre’s solution was simply to define the People as those who supported the Jacobins, with himself then as the embodiment of the will of the People. He could then commit mass murder against Frenchmen in the name of the People and turn himself into a dictator. As the majority of Frenchmen lacked a revolutionary consciousness, they did not count as the People. As such, they needed to be reeducated or killed in order for the real people to come into themselves.

One of the main ways that the French Revolution influenced classical Marxism is that it taught Marxists to distinguish between peasants and urban workers and assume that only rural workers counted as the People. Peasants lacked a revolutionary consciousness. They still clung to Christian beliefs and the land that they worked on. Allow for some basic land reform to turn peasants into small landowners and peasants would turn into the staunchest defenders of the establishment. By contrast, Marxists assumed that urban workers could be turned into a properly revolutionary class. By moving to the city, workers could be assumed to have dropped their Christianity and their dreams of owning some land or a small business. Trapped under the heel of a capitalist boss, the worker would have no choice but to embrace a total revolution of society.

The main threat to urban workers developing a revolutionary consciousness was nationalism. Workers, having abandoned their precocial identity as living in a village or province, might, upon moving to large cities, choose to identify with the nation and believe that they could improve their lot by engaging in national politics instead of a global revolution. As such, nationalism needed to be denounced. Those who believed in their nation could not be the People. 

The classical Marxist opposition to the bourgeoise, religion, and nationalism helps explain the deeply seeded anti-Semitism within Marxism and the wider left. Historically, Jews have functioned as an economic class, a religion, and as an ethnicity. All three of these manifestations of Judaism were problematic from a Marxist perspective. Obviously, Marxists could not accept the role that Jews have historically played as merchants and moneylenders. Jews also needed to abandon their beliefs in being chosen by God. Finally, Jews could no longer think of themselves as a people but instead should assimilate into the wider human family. Take away Judaism as an economic class, a religion, and an ethnicity and there is nothing left. As such, for Marxists, Jews did not exist as a people and Judaism needed to disappear. Only by abandoning Jewish peoplehood could Judaism join the People. 

One of the ironies of Marxist anti-Semitism is that it was not lessened by the large numbers of Jewish Marxists. On the contrary, Jewish Marxists promoted anti-Semitism. To be accepted as a Marxist, a Jew needed to demonstrate that they rejected everything about Judaism. At most a non-particularist version of Judaism (Tikkun Olam) could be allowed to survive. Such a Judaism is not any kind of Judaism at all but it is useful for covering the fact that the goal is the elimination of Judaism. Following this logic, Jewish identity could be allowed as long as a Jew used their position as a Jew to denounce Judaism and argue that they were not being anti-Semitic in doing so on the grounds that they were Jewish and were fulfilling the true Jewish spirit of humanistic universalism.     

Oppression and Alienation: Understanding Palestinian Terrorism

This post owes a debt to Clarissa. I made the decision not to talk about Russia here for the purpose of space and lack of competency in the field but much of what I say here about Hamas and the logic of alienation being used to justify irrational cruelty as an end in of itself has been influenced by her discussions of Russia’s motivations for invading Ukraine and their sense of grievance against the West.

Classical liberalism is fundamentally concerned with physical oppression. The problem with the world is that there are people out there willing to burn people at the stake for believing the wrong things about the nature of the Eucharist or some other obscure metaphysical issue. If only people learned to interfere in other people's private lives a little less, the world would become significantly better, though still far from a perfect, place. This needs to be contrasted with the leftist revolutionary tradition stemming from Jacques Rousseau. Here, the central crime is alienation. To be clear, there is usually a connection between physical oppression and alienation. People who claim alienation will usually be able to claim some sort of historical persecution. This allows leftist revolutionaries to cloak themselves as struggling against some sort of oppression. The reality is that alienation is distinct from physical oppression. By blurring the distinction, leftist revolutionaries can claim that opposing them by definition makes you an oppressor and justifies their use of physical violence against you. This has important implications for understanding current events like the Israel-Hamas war and why people on the left are so willing to support Hamas even as it goes against every value the left pretends to support. 

With persecution, Zayid does a conscious malicious action to Umar, who is the passive victim. The logical implication of this is that Umar has the right to respond by doing bad things to Zayid to cause him to stop. With alienation by contrast, Umar is the victim of historical forces that Zayid might, in some sense benefit from, but are certainly not his creation. These forces render Umar passive and stop him from developing his authentic self as a member of a particular group. Furthermore, alienation might even cause Umar to develop a false consciousness where he becomes grateful to Zayid as his benefactor and comes to identify with Zayid's group. If Zayid were merely Umar's persecutor, he could do something about it; mainly, he could stop or at least lessen his persecutory actions. With alienation, there is nothing that Zayid can do. First, he is not the cause of Umar's alienation, just the practical manifestation of it. Second, any attempt, on Zayid's part, to help Umar will actually increase his alienation. With persecution, there can be more or less of it; with alienation, its mere existence is an ultimate evil. Despite the fact that Zayid is not responsible for Umar’s alienation, by equating alienation with physical oppression, Umar gains the moral right to harm Zayid even if Zayid is a good person who honestly wants to help Umar.

How does this thinking look when applied to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? Imagine a Palestinian living in Gaza before October 7. He is going to work in Israel and gets stopped at an Israeli checkpoint where a soldier beats him up. This would be physical oppression. In a classical liberal story, our Palestinian would get to work and his Israeli boss and co-workers would become aware of the injustices of Israeli rule over Palestinians. This they reject out of their liberal universalist humanism, which teaches that there is really no such thing as Israelis and Palestinians; rather, we are all united in a common humanity. As such, in addition, to getting the Palestinian to a hospital, the Israelis join with the Palestinian to protest against military abuse and work for a two-state solution or even a single secular liberal democracy for all. 

This story becomes quite different if we look at it from the perspective of alienation. Here, the primary crime of Israel is not any land they took from Palestinians or the occupation but the fact that they stand in the way of the development of a true Palestinian consciousness. From this perspective, the real threat is not the Israeli soldier. On the contrary, the soldier serves a valuable purpose. His persecution of Palestinians serves to awaken their consciousness as Palestinians, who as victims of Israel can claim moral superiority. By contrast, the liberal Israelis, through their universalist humanism, challenge the very notion of Palestinian identity. In fact, the more that they attempt to limit Israeli oppression the more they increase Palestinian alienation. It would not help if the liberal Israelis decided to leave their land and give it to the Palestinian. The Palestinian would still live under the hegemony of Western thought as he would be tempted to be grateful to the liberal Israelis and try to now be like them.  

To be clear, Palestinian alienation should be understood within the larger perspectives of Arab nationalism. Once upon a time, Arabs were a dominant power. Then came Imperialism, where Arabs came under European domination. More than just an injustice in the sense of persecution, it brought about alienation. Remember that, unlike the Mongols who destroyed Baghdad in 1258, the French and the British had a plausible argument that it was their right and moral duty to "civilize" Arabs. As such, Arabs lost their proper consciousness of being superior but also came to suspect that the West might really be better. To make matters worse, just at the moment that the British were finally leaving the Middle East, you had the establishment of the State of Israel and it turned out Arabs could not even defeat the Jews. This would imply that Arabs were really pathetic unless we assume that the Jews are the center of a vast conspiracy. The only way to escape this alienation is for Arabs to decisively demonstrate their superiority so that they no longer even have to compare themselves to the West. By destroying Israel and saving the world from the Jewish conspiracy, they would show that they had deserved to be on top as the movers of history all along. (To be clear, while being an Arab is not the same thing as being a Muslim, Islam can easily be substituted for the purpose of this narrative if that is what appeals to the particular individual.) 

Solving Palestinian alienation would require that Palestinians not only physically defeat Israel but do so in a way that gave them the moral high ground as the superior culture. This simultaneously means that Israelis must acknowledge that the Palestinians were right all along but that all the real work was done by Palestinians. Following the logic of Robin DiAngelo, Israelis would have to work to dismantle not only the State of Israel but also even the liberal Jewish identity that made it possible while acknowledging that, due to the enormous crime of Zionism, there is nothing that Israelis can ever do to atone for the unearned privilege of being Israeli. Even for Israelis to take credit for dismantling Israel would be an act of oppression as that would imply that Palestinians are not fully capable on their own and need the help of Israeli "white saviors." All credit must go to the Palestinians who not only defeated Israel all on their own but were magnanimous enough to allow Israelis the illusion of helping out of a desire to help even such loathsome beings as Israelis. In truth, Being an Israeli so twists a person's thinking that even their attempts to atone are secretly still attempts to exert power and therefore oppression. As such, there really is no way for Israelis to help Palestinians solve the problem of alienation. The closest that an Israeli can come is to acknowledge that there is nothing that they can do to atone for the crime of being Israeli but they can only strive to learn to better humiliate themselves. 

Clearly, Palestinian alienation cannot be solved and that is actually the point. As long as Palestinians never overcome their alienation, they can never be held responsible for any of their actions. Furthermore, they have a blank check to commit any atrocity. All of this becomes justified as part of the struggle against oppression. This is a highly attractive offer, one that few people have the mental health to resist.       

Once one recognizes this distinction between physical oppression and alienation, so much of what might confuse regular Westerners about the Israel-Hamas war begins to make sense. Why did Hamas seize power in Gaza after Israel left in 2005 and turn it into a terror base, building tunnels instead of trying to improve the economy? What sort of advocate for Palestine could have thought that attacking Israel on October 7th was a good idea knowing that it would lead to the current devastation of Gaza we are now seeing? Living in peace with Israel once Gaza could develop as its own state might have improved the lives of ordinary Palestinians but it would have still left them in Israel’s shadow, both economically and morally. To overcome their alienation, Hamas needs to defeat Israel militarily while claiming the moral high ground in the eyes of the world.

Most of the towns that were hardest hit were populated by Israelis on the left. These were people who worked hard to improve relations with Palestinians and provide employment for them. This kindness was repaid by Palestinian workers providing intelligence for Hamas on the layout and security procedures of these towns. The largest number of Israeli civilian casualties came from the Nova Music Festival, which presumably had a similar ratio of conservatives to liberals as you would find at Burning Man. This has helped unite Israel. Unlike attacks on settlements, which allow Israeli leftists to argue that it is only the "mean oppressive right-wingers" that stand in the way of peace, the attacks of October 7 have made it abundantly clear that Hamas wants to murder all Israelis, regardless of where they stand on the political spectrum. It is liberal Israelis who truly threaten Palestinian identity. As long as the world thinks that there is a version of Zionism that is ok, they will not allow for the full river to the sea liberation of Palestine. Just as there can be no such thing as a liberal Nazi, there can be no such thing as a liberal Zionist. To demonstrate this point, it is precisely the liberal Zionists who must be murdered.

At first glance, it might seem absurd to accuse Israel of genocide. Where are the Israeli gas chambers and crematoria or their equivalent infrastructure-intensive machinery to indicate a top-down conspiracy to wipe out as many Palestinians as possible? Does anyone believe that even right-wing Israeli officials care so much about killing Palestinians for its own sake that they would sabotage the Israeli war effort to cause Israel to fall under foreign occupation just to kill a few more Palestinians? Here, genocide must be understood in the sense of alienation as opposed to physical oppression. Genocide in the sense of alienation does not require anyone to be murdered. You are guilty of genocide if you do anything to interfere with the development of a group’s identity. From the perspective of alienation, the Israelis living near Gaza and minding their own business, even if they were little kids, were the moral equivalents of Nazi concentration camp guards so it was right to kill them. 

From a leftist revolutionary point of view, such actions were not genocide. The Palestinian people rising up against their oppressors as part of the recovery of their national identity can never be guilty of genocide. Furthermore, Israelis, since they are oppressors, have no true identity to be wiped out. On the contrary, as we know from Freire, attacking an oppressor is not really violence but a redemptive act of love.

In a perverse sense, Hamas has been successful. The October 7^th attack surprised Israel. It required years of sophisticated planning and logistics. Now, no one can think of Hamas as incompetent at least militarily. An even more important victory for Hamas is that they have demonstrated that they can kill Israelis in all sorts of horrific ways without losing popular support on the Arab street or even on Western college campuses. The fact that Western leftists have been forced to go against their stated values such as protecting rape victims demonstrates the moral power of Hamas. They are so powerful that they do not have to conform themselves to Western values. On the contrary, it is the Westerners who wish to confirm to Hamas’ values.         

Shelby Steele argues that much of the radicalism of the 1960s was made possible because the mainstream white establishment had lost its moral authority due to being implicated in the crime of enabling segregation. As such, white elites now needed blacks to return to them the moral authority they previously possessed. This meant surrendering in the face of the demands of student radicals regardless of whether these demands had any connection to improving the lives of blacks living in poverty. 

A similar dynamic may be playing itself out between the Western left and Hamas. The Western left has a hypocrisy problem. For all of its rhetoric of overthrowing Capitalism, it has been too easily seduced by its comforts. Campus radicals are not about to give up their iPhones let alone the opportunity to work for Apple. This has given rise to a corporate pretend radicalism without any substance that actually strengthens big business.

Much as the Civil Rights movement revealed the hypocrisy of 1950s white liberals by showing what an actual liberal movement could be, Hamas has shown what it means to truly be a revolutionary decolonization movement. Hamas does not allow concerns about codes of conduct or even the day-to-day welfare of the residents of Gaza to stand in the way of their struggle against Zionism. The Western left knows that to restore their credibility as a revolutionary movement they need to embrace Hamas as the true embodiment of everything the left hopes to be. By supporting Hamas from thousands of miles away, leftists can maintain their moral authority as revolutionary opponents of Capitalism while still being able to live lives of Capitalist comfort at home.

One thing that I would hope readers take away from my discussion of alienation is that it is fundamentally a mind virus. Alienation cannot offer solutions to real-world problems. It is precisely the attempt to do so that worsens the problem. Thinking of oneself as suffering from alienation cannot even solve the personal psychological problem of alienation. On the contrary, feeling alienated is an addictive drug that feels good in the short run precisely because it presents the perfect excuse for not taking responsibility and attempting concrete actions to improve your life. All of this is quite intentional. The purpose of left-wing revolutionary ideologies is to have a revolution that places leftists in power. This requires a class of individuals who are psychologically broken to such an extent that they cannot function in society and therefore can be pushed into supporting a never-ending revolution in the hope that they can somehow be healed.

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