Ignoring Genocide is the Horrific Deeply Human Response to Evil

 

Part of the challenge in defending Israel in its war against Hamas is that there are two charges that Israel confronts and our opponents casually switch between the two, Motte and Bailey style. The first is that Israeli policy is problematic and that Israel has done things it should not have during the Gaza War. In truth, I agree that Israel is guilty on this front. There may be readers who take a less charitable view of Israel, but, at the end of the day, we are going to be arguing along a spectrum. The second charge, based in the previously discussed chimerical anti-Zionism, sees any wrongdoing on Israel's part as merely a manifestation of the cosmic evil that Israel embodies. From this perspective, Israel, simply by existing, is already as guilty as the Nazis.  

Defending Israel against the first kind of charge, even when Israel might factually be innocent, is likely to be ineffective. The reason for this is that, if our opponent is a chimerical anti-Zionist, they are not really arguing based on the particular bad thing they are accusing Israel of at the moment. Instead, Israel is guilty of the particular charge because the speaker has already made Israel the ultimate villain in a make-believe morality play. 

One thinks of the example of Holocaust denial. One might be tempted into getting into a technical discussion about the practicality of Zyklon B to mass murder people or whether crematoria could be used to dispose of the bodies, but, for the Holocaust denier, those were never the real issues. The Holocaust denier starts with the assumption of the grand Jewish plot and that Jews really have the power and inclination to fake something like the Holocaust for their own nefarious purposes. We see something similar with Candace Owens. She is not interested in an honest discussions of the technical issues surrounding Charlie Kirk's murder. That is simply a stage for her to present her story that Israel is the grand mastermind of global evil. In both cases, a response needs to be centered around turning the tables on the conspiracy charge to make the case that it is the people claiming a Jewish/Israeli conspiracy who are the ones plotting to commit mass murder.      

In regards to the charge of Israel committing genocide, a few things should be noted. One, convicting Israel requires a highly idiosyncratic interpretation of the term, far outside its common usage. Two, those who charge Israel with genocide would never wish to apply the same standards to Arab and Islamic history. Three, the genocide charge was popularized even before Israel invaded Gaza on October 27th, 2023. This suggests that the charge of genocide has nothing to do with anything Israel may have done. Instead, those who charge Israel with genocide see Israel as this grand evil, whose very existence is an act of genocide. As such, the mass murder of Israelis, such as on October 7th, becomes a "defense" against genocide.   

Even when we are dealing with honest critics of Israel (and there are good reasons to be critical of Israel's actions), their information is likely to be tainted by chimerical anti-Zionists. We are not going to be able to make any progress, even with such people, unless they can be convinced to accept that, yes, chimerical anti-Zionism, much like chimerical anti-Semitism, exists and, as such, there really is a "vast anti-Israel conspiracy." This means that news hostile to Israel needs to be treated with skepticism and that, furthermore, Israel needs to be granted a great deal of license to fight the manifestations of this conspiracy. 

Take the example of schools in Gaza. It is hard for a regular person to fathom the idea that Hamas would build tunnels underneath schools with the intention that Israel will have to bomb them, allowing Hamas collaborators in the mainstream press to accuse Israel of bombing schools. What kind of psychopath would try to get their own kids killed? Furthermore, you have the idea that schools run by a perfectly "respectable" international organization like UNRWA are really Hamas training institutes. This means that high-ranking elements within the United Nations are actively part of a conspiracy to help Hamas destroy Israel, in essence to carry out another Holocaust. I admit that all of this sounds far-fetched, the kind of nonsense that regime propagandists would say to try to silence those exposing their human rights crimes. That being said, once you accept that chimerical anti-Zionism, as an extension of chimerical anti-Semitism, exists, then, all of a sudden, this becomes quite plausible.   

For those of you who are new to this concept that Israel really is the target of a vast international conspiracy founded on the fact that large parts of the world honestly operate on a Protocols of the Elders of Zion-based narrative that Jews, and by extension Israel, are the primary source of what is wrong with the world, consider the number of condemnations issued by the UN against Israel compared to the number issued against rogue regimes like North Korea. Either you must believe that Israel, which for all of its very real faults is still a functional liberal democracy, is a worse abuser of human rights than North Korea or accept that there is something fundamentally rotten about the UN and how it approaches human rights. 

Considering the challenge of defending Israel without recognizing that it is under attack by an ideological conspiracy, it becomes important to focus on the chimerical issue over responding to particular factual charges. For example, it is useless to respond to the charge of Israel committing genocide unless we have first considered why there is a mass movement accusing Israel of such. Take this tweet from John Cusack, where he claims that "to be obsessed with stopping a genocide is a deeply human, moral response to evil." 

Contrary to John Cusack, it is not deeply human to be obsessed with stopping a genocide. I wish it were, but the facts are otherwise. If Israel were guilty of genocide, it would stand as the genocide with the greatest protest opposition and that itself would require an explanation. 

Consider the example of the Holocaust. Even though the Allies were fighting Nazi Germany, there was little interest in stopping the Holocaust. Nazi atrocities received little attention even when the information was available. When they were reported, the Jewish element tended to be ignored. The fact that we were at war with the Nazis actually made it more difficult to publicize the Holocaust because people were inclined to dismiss such claims simply as wartime propaganda. Keep in mind that, during World War I, German atrocities in Belgium were widely reported and turned out to be bogus. 

Even in the immediate aftermath of the war, when Nazi crimes were exposed to the world, there was little interest, outside of Jewish circles, in the Holocaust. It took years for the Nazis to be seen in Western eyes as ultimate manifestations of evil. In essence, we did not yet have the Nazis of Godwin's Law that we take for granted today, where, if you are stuck trying to find a word to denounce someone, you simply call them a Nazi. 

This change was not because of the Holocaust, but because both the right and the left found it convenient to use the Nazis as shorthand for evil. If you were a mid-twentieth-century conservative, Nazis became the ultimate evil that America fought against. This meant that, contrary to what the left claimed, the United States and its military power were fundamentally good for the world. If you were on the left, Nazism was the extreme manifestation of right-wing evil. In essence, conservatives were all really secret Nazis trying to lead us down the path of Germany. Rather than this vilification of the Nazis being caused by the Holocaust, it was the other way around. 

Once the Nazis became society's shorthand for evil, suddenly the Holocaust became something that everyone could take an interest in and this led to the greatest rise of philo-Semitism in history. The right could embrace Israel as the Jews picking themselves up by their bootstraps after the horrors of the Holocaust and fighting for traditional liberal Western values. The left could embrace Jews as the victims of European Christianity. As such, for decades, the Holocaust "benefited" Jews and made them popular, not because of anything related to the Jews themselves but because they were useful good guys in the stories that both the right and left wished to tell. 

To be clear, the Holocaust was real and its basic facts were well known. It was simply that, before about the 1970s, non-Jews did not particularly care. Even today, there is little concern with the crimes of Imperial Japan such as the Rape of Nanking. It is not that the facts are unknown or in dispute; it is simply a matter of there being no reason for people to want to actively think about them. Japanese crimes do not easily fit into anyone's narrative. If you are on the right, you have the inconvenient fact that we kept Emperor Hirohito on his throne. If you are on the left, you have the inconvenient fact that the Japanese were not white European imperialists; on the contrary, they acted in the name of "freeing Asia" from European imperialism. 

Alternatively, consider the Rwandan Genocide of 1994, something that happened when John Cusack was already a famous actor. For some reason, he did not use his celebrity to bring attention to what was happening. The massacre of the Tutsis happened in the face of modern media and was well publicized even as the public was largely indifferent. To care about Rwanda, you needed to simultaneously care about people in the middle of Africa and about people who were victims of someone other than whites.  

Imagine a truly evil dictator of a country that most Americans would not be able to find on a map. In the spirit of being truly evil, they decide to invade their neighbor, another country that most Americans would not be able to find on a map and wipe out an ethnic group that most people have never heard of. To do this right, our dictator has hatched their plan with the help of their top experts in international law (these are lawyers, so we can already assume that they are evil) to make sure that mass murdering these people will check off every possible box to count as a genocide. The massacre begins; the worst barbaric atrocities imaginable are filmed and broadcast to the world. Could you manufacture the kind of protest movement that Israel has faced? 

It seems obvious to me that any attempt to convince tens of thousands of college students around the world to put their lives on hold and join a protest movement to shut down campuses to force politicians to take action would fail.

   

It would not be because people would be unaware or not be horrified by these atrocities. It would simply be a matter of them lacking a motive to actively care; they would lack any larger narrative to make any of this relevant. The dictator is not a useful stand-in for Western Imperialism and the minority group being slaughtered is not a manifestation of the revolutionary spirit against oppression. It would take decades and a massive informational campaign to change this. It is unlikely that the backlash against the dictator would happen in time to stop an actual genocide and the motives for trying to demonize the dictator are unlikely to even have much to do with saving the minority group. 

I encourage readers, whatever their religion or ethnicity, to honestly read about what is going on with the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. You are likely going to find good reasons to be critical of Netanyahu or of any Prime Minister that might replace him. Israel is in a difficult situation, particularly as it attempts to operate as a liberal democracy committed to human rights. Those who care about the survival of liberal democracies under military threat need to study the Israeli example, both what it has done right and its mistakes. 

None of this has anything to do with the vast majority of Israel's most committed critics. Their opposition to Israel is rooted in an imaginary narrative in which Israel assumes the role of ultimate evil whose dark villainy serves to show the critic in a heroic light. John Cusack did not speak out in the same strident fashion against the Hutus as he does against Israel, because there was no organized movement encouraging him to do so. Furthermore, he would have risked being seen as a white imperialist promoting racist stereotypes. By contrast, denouncing Israel serves to place Cusack within a global leftist movement that opposes the American world order that grew out of World War II and defeated the Soviet Union. Israel was a creation of the West and its moral defense has relied on the fact that it stands on the front lines of protecting and promoting Western values. Defeat Israel morally and you have the basis for a wider attack on the legitimacy of American political hegemony. From this perspective, Israel already assumes supreme guilt. The particular facts of Israeli crimes are only incidental.        

Chimerical Anti-Semitism and Anti-Zionism

 

Part of being a student of Jewish History is an awareness of Gavin Langmuir's distinction between a realistic and a chimerical anti-Semitism. Take the example of medieval Christendom.  In 1096, Jews in the Rhineland were murdered by roving bands of Crusaders. (It is important to keep in mind that not all Crusaders supported killing Jews and many Christians, such as the Bishop of Speyer, actively protected Jews.) Those Jews who were murdered were killed for "crimes" that they were most certainly guilty of. Imagine if those Jews were put on trial:

"Jew, do you believe that Jesus is the Son of God?

"No. I believe that he was a mamzar and his mother was a zonah."

Not to approve of the mass murder of Jews, but it did not happen because Christians misunderstood something about the nature of Judaism. The Crusaders were looking to kill unbelievers and they were correct in assuming that Jews were unbelievers.  

The big question at the heart of the study of medieval Christian anti-Semitism is: how do you explain what happened in the twelfth century? For some reason, and there is a vast literature with a wide variety of theories as to why this happened, Christians somehow came to believe that Jews actively served Satan. Their ancestors during the first century crucified Jesus precisely because they knew that he was the Son of God and that contemporary Jews gathered to reenact the crucifixion by torturing innocent Christian children to death. In essence, twelfth-century Christendom went insane. 

Considering that medieval Christianity was no longer thinking rationally regarding Jews, it must be understood that, regardless of whether medieval Jews were particularly saintly, medieval Christian chimerical anti-Semitism had nothing to do with Jews and everything to do with Christianity. Christians might have come to believe that Jews were greedy because of Jewish moneylenders. Christians coming to believe that Jews served the Devil required something internal to Christianity. To be clear, what precisely that internal issue was is an open question, but insanity is, by its nature, something internal to the human mind. 

In modern times, we have the example of Nazi Germany. It would have been one thing if the Nazis had simply believed that Jews were greedy capitalists or revolutionary communists. Early in the Nazi period, we have Hitler ignoring the pleas of leading German scientists not to expel Jews from the universities, as this would damage German science. Hitler believed that the Jewish threat was of such a nature that he knowingly sabotaged German scientific development. Considering the role of Jews in the Manhattan Project and Nazi dismissal of Relativity as a "Jewish physics," Nazi anti-Semitism quite literally caused them to lose the race for the atomic bomb and ultimately the War. 

The Nazis started World War II and used it as a cover to carry out the Holocaust because they believed in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion; in essence, that there was a vast Jewish conspiracy, stretching from Wall Street to the Kremlin, that threatened to take over the world. The Holocaust was not only one of the greatest acts of human evil; it was also profoundly foolish. What was the logic of diverting trains, in the middle of a war, to murder useful slave laborers? In essence, people like Eichmann, who carried out the Final Solution during the final two years of the War, when Germany was losing, did so knowing full well that they were likely costing Germany the War. They were "humanitarians," willing to sacrifice their own country in order to save the world from the Jews.     

Considering the irrational nature of Nazi anti-Semitism, it should be understood that, whatever its origins, it never was really about the Jews. There were many things one can fault early twentieth-century Jews for. Nothing that Jews did could ever explain why the Nazis would do something so destructive to themselves as the Holocaust. The Nazis believed that Jews were an existential threat to the world for reasons that could only have come from an internal discourse within German thought that had nothing to do with Jews.  

Chimerical anti-Semitism becomes important for understanding modern anti-Zionism. Whether or not anti-Zionism actually is anti-Semitism, it lends itself to the sort of chimerical thinking that is the hallmark of anti-Semitism. Let me be clear. There are good reasons for Arabs and Muslims to object to the State of Israel and even be willing to use armed force to eliminate it. This is different than believing that the State of Israel is at the center of some kind of grand conspiracy to rule the world.   

Consider the example of October 7th. I can understand why Hamas would attack IDF bases along the Gaza border, but why shoot people at the Nova Music festival? Hamas' leadership had to have known that their actions would lead to the bombing of Gaza. What did they do to protect and feed Gaza's citizens? One has to conclude that Hamas made the calculation to not only murder Israeli citizens but to sacrifice Gaza's civilians as well. In essence, like the Nazis, they were willing that their own country should be destroyed if it might strike a blow against the Jewish conspiracy. 

As for the anti-Israel protesters, I can understand why people would speak out and question the death and destruction in Gaza. The fact that this opposition exceeds that against only ongoing conflict, including the Russian invasion of Ukraine, suggests that this is not really about whether Israel's response has been excessive, but a narrative in which Israel is not merely a small country on the other side of the world that engages in morally problematic behavior, but some sort of grand cosmic villain.

Like Hamas, opponents of Israel's war in Gaza care nothing about Gazan civilians. If you believed that Israel was actually carrying out a genocide, your first response would be to try to get as many Palestinians as possible out of Gaza. One thinks of the example of Jewish relief organizations trying to get Jews out of Nazi-controlled Europe only to run up against the fact that no country wanted to take in large numbers of Jewish refugees. Alternatively, consider the millions of Ukrainian refugees who are currently residing within the European Union. Why have the Arabs not done something similar for the people of Gaza?  

The lack of interest in getting Palestinians out of Gaza becomes particularly farcical when you consider that Israel did not launch its attack on Gaza until about three weeks after October 7th. Already at this point, Palestinian activists were accusing Israel of genocide, but not using this window to evacuate civilians. It would have been a simple thing for Egypt to allow Palestinians into the Sinai Desert, where the international community could have set up refugee camps for them. This did not happen because Palestinian activists care even less about Palestinian lives than Israel does. Israel has some incentive to limit Palestinian deaths to avoid international pressure. For "supporters" of Palestine, dead Palestinian civilians are simply a sacrifice to awaken the world to the evils of Zionism. For them, Zionism's evil lies in the metaphysical fact that it is a settler-colonialist apartheid entity that causes Palestinian alienation; it has nothing to do with how Israel physically treats Palestinians. 

This is not a defense of Israeli government policy, against which there can be numerous legitimate objections. That being said, it should be recognized that the opposition to Israel has nothing to do with anything Israel might have done, however morally dubious. This fixation on Israel, as opposed to numerous other countries with lousy human rights records, must be the result of something other than Israel. 

Recognizing this distinction between regular prejudice and chimerical hate allows us to better understand anti-Semitism and to navigate the Israeli-Arab conflict. There is a common misunderstanding of prejudice where prejudice itself leads to genocidal violence. You can believe that Jews are greedy and manipulative and still be a perfectly friendly neighbor. This is distinct from having a narrative where a group becomes the conveyor of cosmic evil that must be resisted at all costs. If you are willing to sacrifice your own people to save the world from the Jews, of course you are also going to be willing to wipe out the Jews for trying to destroy the world.   

While chimerical anti-Semites may wish to kill Jews, they have almost as little regard for the lives of their own people. For all the talk of the Nazis or Hamas about Jews oppressing Germans or Palestinians, they both were willing to destroy their own people as well. The reason for this is that it was never about what Jews might have actually physically done to Germans or Palestinians. Instead, the real Jewish crime is something existential against the moral order. As such, the Jews need to be defeated no matter how many non-Jews die in the process. On the contrary, the death of non-Jews will make for an even more glorious reborn world, as this sacrifice will show a greater rejection of the Jewish metaphysical evil.  

As for confronting chimerical anti-Zionism, there is nothing you can do to mitigate it. Whatever concessions Israel should or should not make to the Palestinians, I will leave to the Israeli government and ultimately its voting public. That being said, let us be clear that nothing Israel does can ever affect those opponents who are chimerical anti-Zionists, as their turn toward chimerical anti-Zionism never had anything to do with Israel. Instead, it is the product of issues within the Arab-Islamic or leftist/rightest psyche and will only be resolved there. 

As terrifying as chimerical anti-Zionists may be, it also offers us a kind of moral clarity. Unlike conventional prejudice, chimerical opponents honestly want to kill us at all costs to themselves and can never be negotiated with. As such, we should have no qualms with trying to get them first. As to the fear that we might kill innocent people and create more chimerical anti-Zionists, we can be confident that this will not be the case. Bombing people might create anti-Zionists who dislike us and even wish to fight back. It will never create chimerical anti-Zionists who believe that Israel is the ultimate evil to be wiped out no matter the cost.  

From the River to the Sea and the Horrific Doctrine

 

I was in a public library when I found a home-printed-looking pro-Palestinian magazine titled Where is Home. 

It is a collection of mostly poems, artwork, and a few short essays. As a regular listener of Haviv Rettig Gur, the primary thing that stuck out to me was that this was not a serious exploration of a complicated geopolitical issue involving real people on both sides. Instead, it was a cartoon morality play. For the creators of this magazine, Palestine seems to have little to do with a physical place. It is treated as a kind of psychomachy, a war of the soul, that manifests the world's decision whether to embrace love or hate.

I was particularly interested in the introductory essay, which begins:

FROM THE RIVER TO THE SEA PALESTINE WILL BE FREE

Do you see the words "murder" or "death sentence" being remotely implied in this phrase above? We don't either, yet some people will gasp, call you antisemitic, and believe it is an outcry to kill Jewish people.

   

For the zine's intended audience, chanting "from the River to the Sea" as part of a like-minded crowd is something that makes them good people standing up against injustice. It has nothing to do with trying to solve problems in the Middle East by reaching out to the opposition through negotiation and compromise to avoid getting millions of people killed.

From the perspective of anyone not absolutely committed to the Palestinian cause, the sort of people you actually negotiate with in the non-cartoon universe, the claim that the River to the Sea chant could never have anything to do with murder is laughable. Are the authors, Madi Parsley and Ivan Salinas, unaware of the concept of euphemistic language? Advocates of mass murder rarely call for it openly. Real mass murderers talk in code. This code signals marching orders to those actually carrying out the crime, such as operating a gas chamber. In addition, the code serves to protect the wider population of enablers, allowing them to collaborate in the crime while pretending they have no idea what is really happening. For example, the ordinary German who supported sending Jews "to the East" for "resettlement" must have known at some level that this meant murder, but the phrasing allowed them to pretend otherwise.

Imagine a pro-Israel person saying, "From the River to the Sea, Eretz Yisroel Shall Be Free." I assume the authors would agree that there would be valid reasons to suspect this was a dog whistle to commit mass murder, even though the statement says just as much about murder as the Palestinian slogan. We can assume that, in this "redeemed" Eretz Yisroel, there would be no place for Palestinians. Who else are we making the land free from? Furthermore, if lots of Palestinians happen to die in a way that is deemed "completely their fault" during the "sacred" task of bringing about the cosmic good of Eretz Yisroel, a cause that transcends the flawed politics and borders of a limited State of Israel, who should complain? A few million dead people are a small price to pay for the redemption of the world, particularly if they were the evil ones who were standing in the way of salvation in the first place.

In truth, as I have argued previously, it must be taken for granted that every doctrine is a kill order. If you claim that your beliefs do not make you complicit in mass murder, you are either lying or you have not seriously thought your beliefs through. To use a math analogy, we understand the nature of a quadratic equation, in part, by finding the roots, those points on the x-axis where y = 0. So too, we only truly understand an ideology when we can find those points where it advocates murder. To be clear, there are going to be quadratic equations where the discriminant involves the square root of a negative number, leaving us no real roots where y = 0. Similarly, in politics, there are Tolstoyian pacifists who will refuse violence even at the cost of allowing the entire world to fall to evil. For example, Tolstoy advocated refusing to convict murderers, allowing them back on the streets to kill again because the legal system itself is a form of violence. While such pacifism allows the believer to personally avoid committing violence, the real-world implications of this position are so monstrous as to defy the imagination.

Imagine if we were to hand Parsley and Salinas a button that they could press to free Palestine from the River to the Sea. It would also "magically" "resettle" all Israelis in the "East." These Israelis would never be heard from again, but their fate would not be the fault of the Palestinians, who we all know are wonderful people only caring about fighting for freedom and justice. Alternatively, they can refuse to press the button. This will crush all Palestinian resistance, leaving the River to the Sea in Israeli hands forever. Perhaps I am wrong, but I have a hard time imagining our authors not pressing the button. For them, Palestine is not about actual Palestinians and their claim to a piece of land along the Mediterranean coast. Instead, Palestine is nothing less than the redemption of the world from cosmic evil. Who would be willing to accept global damnation for the sake of a few million Zionists?

What I have said about Parsley and Salinas applies equally to me. I am not a pacifist. If I had to choose between letting Israel fall victim to an October 7th-style Holocaust and killing every Palestinian, I know what I would choose. Because I know that I would sacrifice their people to save mine, I can empathize with Palestinians who make the same decision, letting my people die to save their own. That being said, if I were given a button that would make Palestine free from the River to the Sea, but in which the lives and property of Israelis would be protected, I would press that button rather than see the bloodshed of Israelis and Palestinians continue. I do not see Israel as the redemption of the world, nor do I see the Palestinians, even Hamas, as cosmic evil. As such, while I may be willing to kill millions of Palestinians to save Jewish lives, I am not about to sacrifice Palestinians, let alone Jews, merely for the cause of Eretz Yisroel. Could supporters of Palestine make the inverse choice, letting Israel win in a way that does not seriously materially harm Palestinians? How could they allow the "evil" of Zionism to persist even at the expense of the Palestinians?

 

Returning to Voyaging Into Jewish History

 

Nearly two years ago, I wrote a post titled Voyaging Into Jewish History. I contrasted the traditional view of Jewish History with that of Zionism. In the traditional view, Jews were powerless in the face of the historical forces opposing them. As such, the most that Jews could hope to accomplish was to survive whatever disasters befell them, presumably through divine aid brought about through the scrupulous observance of Jewish Law. Zionism rejected this view as it forced Jews to play a passive role in politics. Instead, Zionism strove to protect Jews by making them an active political force with a state and an army that could stand against those who wished to harm them. 

I wrote that post about a month before October 7th, when Hamas terrorists invaded Israel, murdering over a thousand Israelis, and taking some 250 hostages. It is important to understand that, just as the Holocaust changed the nature of this debate about Jewish survival, October 7th has once again changed the nature of that conversation. As such, I wished to revisit my earlier post to explore this shift, recognizing that, even nearly two years into this conflict, the implications of October 7th are still in the process of being worked out. 

In a sense, October 7th made the Zionist attempt to solve Jewish History untenable much in the same way that the Holocaust made the traditional view untenable. The traditional view was premised on the notion that anti-Semites were individuals who might temporarily gain power in a particular place, killing large numbers of Jews and forcing the survivors to flee to a safer place. It was never prepared for a major power like Nazi Germany, which did not simply dislike Jews, but made the annihilation of world Jewry central to its own identity. Against such pathological anti-Semitism on a mass societal scale, the only plausible option was for Jews to have a state which would allow Jews to fight to protect themselves and offer sanctuary to any Jew around the world threatened by anti-Semitism. Ultimately, though, Zionism did not solve the problem of Jewish History and we saw that on October 7th when, for just a few hours, thousands of Jews found themselves in the power of Hamas fighters just as, during the Holocaust, European Jews were under the power of the Nazis. Even now, nearly two years later, hostages remain in Hamas captivity and live under conditions that closely parallel that of concentration camps.     

It is useful here to consider the examples of the two Netanyahus, Benzion and Benjamin. Benzion Netanyahu was a medieval historian who specialized in fifteenth-century Spain. At the heart of his work was the failure of the traditional model, as exemplified by Isaac Abarbanel, to fend off the expulsion of 1492. Highly placed Jews like Abarbanel were supposed to be able to use their connections at court to make sure that Jews were protected, making Jewish political sovereignty irrelevant. Abarbanel, though, failed not only to stop the expulsion but even to foresee its coming, which could have saved many Jews. From Benzion Netanyahu's perspective, the belief in the influence of court Jews like Abarbanel embodied the illusion of any hope for Jewish safety outside a sovereign State of Israel. Writing about 15th century Spain was Benzion Netanyahu's way of commenting about the failure 20th century European Jewry to save itself from the Holocaust. Whether in Spain or in Germany, Jewish attempts to assimilate only created more anti-Semitism. Jewish leaders, confident in their ability to bribe and negotiate, were helpless to stop the destruction of their communities and blind even to its coming.   

Considering this, it is rather ironic that it was Benzion Netanyahu's son, Benjamin Netanyahu who was prime minister for the debacle of October 7th. Furthermore, today, much of Netanyahu's appeal relies on the assumption that he can influence President Donald Trump to help Israel. Whether this is true or not, it should be recognized that history has come around in a sort of circle and Benjamin Netanyahu now plays the role of Isaac Abarbanel, the court Jew, that his father so despised. 

That being said, even if Zionism has failed to solve Jewish History, this makes the State of Israel all the more important for Jewish survival. If traditional Jewish statelessness failed to protect Jews against Nazi Germany, I fail to see how anything but a State of Israel can protect Jews worldwide against the ideological forces arrayed against them. These involve Iran and its proxies such as Hezbollah and the Houthis, Sunni Islamists, such as Hamas, and a wide variety of Western leftist revolutionaries, who took to the streets to protest on behalf of Hamas as the October 7th attacks were still going on. It should be understood that these groups do not simply hate Jews, but see the Jews as the primary enemy that must be destroyed (with the exception of those Jews willing to offer them moral cover) in order for their glorious new world to come to being. As such, these enemies cannot be bribed or negotiated with. Their goal is a second Holocaust and nothing can stop them but the full military and political might that only Israel can provide. 

In a sense, October 7th marked the return to Jewish History. Despite the existence of the State of Israel, Jews are once again vulnerable to being murdered in mass. Around the world, pathological anti-Semitism, as opposed to mere prejudice, is now acceptable, particularly on the Left. Once again, we Jews are left standing against opponents who are stronger than us and our goal is to somehow survive. This involves using whatever physical resources available to the best of our ability, whether that is the IDF or AIPAC. Ultimately, though, we have to accept that Jewish survival is a miracle and that being Jewish means being willing to risk one's life in order to participate in the miraculous story that is Jewish History.          

All Conquests After 1928 are Illegitimate: A Review of the Internationalists

 

The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World by Oona Hathaway and Scott J. Shapiro is a book I learned a lot from even as I disagree with its premises. The authors consider our current system of international law to be mostly a positive thing, which they attribute to the 1928 Pact of Paris (also known as Kellogg-Briand). The basic idea of this agreement was to outlaw offensive warfare by declaring that countries needed to refer their disputes to arbitration and that all conquests done after 1928 were not to be recognized by the international community. (By declaring that only future conquests were illegitimate, the pact bypassed the issue of the British and French empires, which were created precisely through the sorts of actions that were now supposed to be illegal.) By implication, the pact granted relevance to international opinion. Now all wars involved the international community as other countries needed to decide whether the agreement had been violated and whether they could recognize new realities on the ground.

The practical implications of this agreement could be seen in the 1931 Japanese invasion of Manchuria. U. S. Secretary of State Henry Stimson refused to recognize Japan's control over Manchuria or the newly proclaimed State of Manchukuo. This struck the Japanese as rather hypocritical as it was hardly obvious how Japan's behavior in Manchuria was any worse than what European imperialists had been doing as a matter of course. Furthermore, Japan still bore bitter memories of Commodore Matthew Perry's diplomacy at gunpoint. Japan's mistake was that they invaded Manchuria three years too late; now there was a new set of rules. 

To be clear, as the authors note, the Pact of Paris did not stop Japan nor any of the other acts of Fascist aggression leading up to World War II. Furthermore, even the judges at Nuremberg ignored an attempt to use the Pact of Paris as a basis for prosecuting Nazi defendants. The idea was that since the actions of Nazi Germany were illegal according to the Pact of Paris, the defendants had no immunity against prosecution. What the authors want to argue is that, despite spending years as mostly a dead letter, in the post-war world, the logic of the Pact of Paris was taken up and became the basis for modern international law. For example, the pact's rejection of territorial expansion meant that, with the notable exception of Poland, international borders changed remarkably little after World War II, particularly if you compare it to World War I. Since World War II, borders have been rather stable and there have been few wars of territorial conquest. It is no longer worth it to conquer territory if the international community will not recognize it.   

For a book that is supposed to be about twentieth-century legal thought, the authors spend quite a lot of time on early modern history. As a foil to modern international law, they set up the seventeenth-century scholar Hugo Grotius. I have long considered Grotius to be one of those proto-Enlightenment thinkers who have been unfairly ignored by the general public. In reading this book, I found myself agreeing with Grotius and thinking that the world would be a much better place if we rejected modern international law and went back to something more along the lines of early modern international law as embodied by Grotius. 

Grotius' seventeenth-century Europe saw the emergence of states as distinct from Christendom or a personal monarchy, with Grotius' native Dutch Republic taking the lead, even as we are still a long way from secular democracies in the modern sense. For Grotius, the state was its own moral entity, distinct from its leaders or population. As such, while Grotius believed that states needed to justify their decisions to go to war, its leaders, population, and even the international community were exempted and even, in practice forbidden, from considering whether the state's justifications were valid. Soldiers fighting a war still had to obey the laws of war and refrain from committing war crimes as these did nothing to bring the war to a conclusion. That being said, they were not asked to be lawyers and historians qualified to evaluate whether their government was in the right. Furthermore, Grotius' version of international law had no third-party enforcement. States that allowed their soldiers to commit atrocities invited retaliation by the opposing army. Finally, since other countries were not expected to be knowledgeable enough to have an opinion about the morality of any particular foreign war, once a treaty was signed, that was the end of the matter. If a country managed to win a war and forced the defeated country to sign away territory in a peace treaty, the new borders must now be accepted by all.

What Hathaway and Shapiro dislike about Grotius is that his type of international law opened the door for all kinds of wars of expansion, with states coming up with factitious reasons to go to war without any oversight and then holding on to their ill-gotten gains. The authors point to the young Grotius working as a lawyer for the Dutch East India Company and defending the seizure of a Portuguese ship, seeing in this the foundation for his later work on international law. 

One of the examples the authors give of countries fighting according to Grotius' international law was the Mexican-American War of 1846-48. President Polk could declare war against Mexico over claims of unpaid debts that few people took seriously even at the time. American soldiers were required to obey their orders and not consult their consciouses. Similarly, the international community had no mandate to consider whether this was a war of aggression and if they had an obligation to intervene. Finally, the morality of Polk's declaration was forever placed beyond challenge by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which gave the American Southwest to the United States. Whether or not the United States had the right to conquer this territory, it now belonged to the United States and attempting to take it away would violate international law. 

Surprisingly enough, Grotius had a direct influence on Japan and its justifications for imperialism. In the nineteenth century, Japanese scholars started reading Grotius as a blueprint for how to operate in the world. Japan was emerging into a world dominated by European countries who had certain understandings between themselves. If Japan was going to be a great power they needed to know what these rules were. Grotius, as the father of international law, seemed to offer them the key. This seemed to work until they invaded Manchuria and they discovered that the rules had changed.  

For all their criticism of Grotius, Hathaway and Shapiro fail to consider the practical benefit of Grotius' willingness to place the question of whether a state was right to go to war in a kind of moral black box. By not demanding that citizens have the right answer as to the morality of their country's war, we protect those citizens. Their country might be in the wrong, but we are still going to grant rights to the soldiers fighting this immoral war and even the politicians. This facilitates limiting the scope of the war and working toward a peace treaty. Allowing even immoral treaties forced upon a weaker power to stand also helps to support peace. We do not want to be refighting every morally questionable war, whether the Mexican-American War or any other war. 

Considering the amount of knowledge required to settle historically based disagreements between countries, modern international law seems designed to promote a regime of international elites, who are simply going to confirm their prejudices as to which country is right in any given dispute. The use of the International Criminal Court against Israel is a good example of this. Those making the case seem willfully blind to the question of what Israel needs to do in order to avoid another October 7th. The moment we consider military necessity, the whole trial would have to be postponed until after the war when Israeli generals would be free to answer questions about their decisions without compromising ongoing military operations.

Hathaway and Shapiro actually discuss the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as an example of the limits of the Paris Peace Pact. Neither the State of Israel nor Palestine existed in 1928 so the pact is useless for deciding borders. Worse, because the pact does not allow for conquest, it leaves us without a framework for a treaty. Any borders agreed to would be open to future challenges as the product of a forced treaty and, therefore, illegitimate. Having Grotius as our model for international law would allow the Palestinians to say that Israel wronged us but we lost the war and now need to move on and make peace.    

Daniel Boyarin's No-State Non-Solution

 

It is easy to dismiss most anti-Zionist Jewish activists as having little connection to Judaism. If your main involvement in Judaism comes when you say "as a Jew" before launching into a tirade against Israel, I feel perfectly comfortable in ignoring both the "as a Jew" and whatever follows about Israel. A notable exception among the anti-Zionists is Prof. Daniel Boyarin. Boyarin is a significant contemporary Jewish thinker, whose work on the Talmud and the origins of the Jewish-Christian split I take seriously. As such, there is reason not to simply dismiss his anti-Zionism, particularly as his anti-Zionism is clearly connected to his understanding of Judaism as a people that transcends politics. 

In reading Boyarin's No-State Solution, I find it fairly unobjectionable in terms of what it says. I agree with him that it is important for Judaism to transcend crude ethno-nationalism. Jews living outside the land of Israel have an important role to play within Judaism and it is deeply problematic to claim that Judaism can only function within the borders of a political state ruled by Jews. Judaism is not merely a religion in the Protestant sense of a collection of beliefs held by an individual nor is Judaism simply a national group bound by blood. A properly functioning Judaism is one that can deal with the complexity that goes into the various ways that people live out a Jewish identity. 

If I were reading Boyarin in 1924, I would have few disagreements with him. If I had lived back in the 1920s, political Zionism would not have been one of my goals. I would have been trying to strengthen Jewish life wherever Jews lived. Granted, recognizing the value of Israel as a spiritual center as well as a physical refuge for Jews fleeing persecution, I would have had a particular interest in promoting Jewish non-political life in Israel. In pursuit of this aim, I would have been attempting to cooperate with the British and the local Arab population. The deal I would have been trying to make with the Arabs would have been that they should allow mass immigration to Palestine along with some measure of local Jewish autonomy with the assurance that Palestine would eventually become part of a larger Arab federation. (I recommend Oren Kessler's Palestine 1936, which argues that this position was very much part of the mainline of Zionism during this period.) 

My main objection to Boyarin is what is left out in his book. We are not living in 1924 but in 2024. This means that the Holocaust has happened. We know that there are people who wield the power of modern states who believe in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and that Judaism is a menace that must be exterminated. Whether Israel should have been established in 1948, the fact is that nearly half of world Jewry currently lives in the State of Israel. This state is surrounded by hostile Arab armies and terrorist groups, who have been influenced by the Protocols and desire to murder Jews. Saying that this is the result of the actions of Zionists does not help as it only makes it easier to believe that our opponents are serious about carrying out the mass murder of Jews. Back in 1924, it was easy to dismiss European anti-Semites as being delusional; what did the Jews ever do to them? If the Nazis could carry out the Holocaust based on pure fantasy, what might Hamas be willing to do if ever given the chance. 

To be fair to Boyarin, his book was written before October 7th. That being said, I have no reason to assume that this past year has caused him to adapt his views. Far more problematic than anything he says is how he completely ignores what should be the primary question regarding the State of Israel as if it does not matter at all. Boyarin's unwillingness to even entertain the question of Jewish safety in the contemporary world, in Israel or anywhere else, collapses his entire argument. Once we begin to consider Jewish safety then one has to consider whether a Jewish willingness to break the limbs of Palestinian children throwing rocks is merely the manifestation of a macho fantasy of Jewish toughness or whether it is a pragmatic solution to save Jewish lives.  

It is almost as if the lives of regular people do not matter to Boyarin. Even Palestinian lives only matter to him in the abstract sense of being victims of Zionism. He gets to live as an academic using trite truths that one should have no need of saying to hide moral monstrosities that no one should have the gall to defend. All this while claiming to care about human lives.  

The Moral Question of Gaza

Imagine if, on October 6^th, Benjamin Netanyahu had called you with the following dilemma. The wall surrounding Gaza, despite looking impressive, has the value of the French Maginot Line. Israeli intelligence knows that Hamas is planning a major assault but cannot say when. For all we know, it might happen tomorrow. The only way to stop this attack is for Israel to launch a preemptive invasion of Gaza and kill, take your pick, ten thousand, one hundred one-hundred-thousand, or a million Palestinians. Failure to commit such an atrocity means that Hamas will send thousands of fighters into Israel, kill twelve hundred people, and take 250 hostages. At what point do you say: “Prime Minister, I understand that this is difficult to hear, but there are certain things that civilized people cannot stoop to doing no matter the cost. You must hold back even though it will lead to an unimaginable tragedy for Israel.

This is the fundamental question that has faced Israel since the attacks of October 7^th. On October 6^th, it was a matter of debate as to whether Hamas could pull off an October 7th-style attack. On October 7^th, they proved that they could. As such, any agreement that Israel makes that allows Hamas to remain intact as a military force, inevitably means that October 7^th will happen again at some point. It does not matter that Israel will learn from its mistakes, so will Hamas and its Iranian sponsors. Most importantly Hamas knows that it can commit large-scale terrorist attacks without losing sympathy in the Muslim world or even with the Western left. As such, Hamas is not going to be held back by the main practical consideration that usually keeps terrorists in check, the concern that killing children will make the enemy more sympathetic.

Let us be clear about what the consequences of repeated October 7^th attacks will be. A state that cannot stop invaders from crossing its borders will cease to have the confidence of its people and will collapse. There will be a mass exodus of people fleeing Israel seeking safety. Refugees are a vulnerable group under the best of circumstances. Combine this with traditional anti-Semitism and the fact that much of the world already thinks that Israel is the equivalent of Nazi Germany and you have the making of a second Holocaust.  

Presumably, there is some moral outer limit to what Israel can do even if the alternative is the Holocaust. The anti-Zionists have a point when they argue that having a State of Israel in the face of Arab opposition requires being willing to do terrible things to the Arabs. At what point do we say that it is not worth it even if we say that it is the Arabs who have brought this calamity upon themselves? To kill people, even bad people, means to be a murderer. This applies to the soldier who pulls the trigger as well as Jewish civilians outside of Israel like me in whose name this killing is being done.  

What if the only way to save Israel and, by extension, the Jewish people was to launch nuclear weapons in a first strike against Arab capitals? I can imagine not pressing that bottom and agreeing to be passively led, along with the rest of those Jews deemed not sufficiently anti-Zionist, to the gas chambers. Better a Final Solution to Judaism than Judaism being responsible for nuclear Armageddon, maybe.

Part of the dream of Zionism is that, in a world in which people want to do bad things to Jews, we should be able to plausibly threaten to do bad things in retaliation. It is a fair question whether the moral cost is worth it. What should not be in doubt are the real-world consequences of not having the power to do those bad things. Part of what I admire about Tolstoy’s pacifist writings was how honest he was about the consequences of his ideas. He was open about his willingness to set murderers free to repeat their crimes. Tolstoy did not believe that one should care about this world, certainly not at the price of destroying one's soul through violence. Like most people, I am too much a pragmatist to follow that path, but I can respect people who do as long as they are being honest about it and are willing to apply this principle to everyone and not just Israel. If oppressed people have the right to resist their oppressors then Israel has the right to storm Gaza.    

Thinking in terms of preventing the next October 7^th, allows us to have an honest conversation about Israel’s actions. A common argument against Israel is that Hamas cannot be destroyed and that Israel has no plan for what to do the day after in Gaza. These arguments sidestep the critical point. Israel certainly can wipe out Hamas. It is less obvious that it can do so without killing hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. As for a day after plan, it is the international community that lacks a plan for allowing two million Palestinians to remain in Gaza while guaranteeing Israel that October 7th will not happen again. If you believe that Israel should allow another October 7th in order to save Palestinian lives, be honest about that. Make no mistake. The choice is between tens of thousands of Palestinian deaths as well as their likely mass expulsion and another October 7th.  

One of the things that shock me about the pro-ceasefire crowd is how open many of them are about wanting another October 7^th. It is not that they want to save Palestinian lives, they want Israelis to die. The charge of genocide serves a similar role. If Israel is guilty of genocide then the Palestinian people have the right to resist with October 7th-style attacks. Obviously, saying that you want a ceasefire to protect Palestinian children from being slaughtered in an Israeli genocide sounds a lot more humanitarian than you want to butcher Israelis.  

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 look ridiculous. We dress up like him, get so drunk that we confuse him with Mordechai, and, yes, we eat cookies shaped like his ears.    

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 7th. 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, that there is really no such thing as Israelis and Palestinians. As such, in addition to getting the Palestinian to a hospital, the Israelis would 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. 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 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 7th 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. As such, 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 conform 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, to overthrow Capitalism. 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.

.