Translated material
Progressive Pogrom: About Shani Luk, Jean Amery and the Anti-Zionist Left
Jack Omer-Jackman
Kronstadt
Every radical generation has its Kronstadt, says American sociologist Daniel Bell, that moment of revelation when, for some at least, the intellectual deviations and moral perversions of the party line become both inevitable and untenable. Bell was old enough for his Kronstadt to be Kronstadt. For others it was the Moscow Trial, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, etc., etc. Even more people refused to acknowledge the Kronstadt moment and went to their graves refusing to admit that there was any flaw in the great liberation, let alone evil.
My own Kronstadt—from an era when the failed Soviet god was replaced by a new deity in the form of decolonization—was less an event than an idea, or rather the exposure of a dogma masquerading as an idea. I remember this with crystal clarity: the moment I read Judith Butler's demand to understand "Hamas/Hezbollah as social movements that are progressive, that are on the left, that are part of the global left."
At that moment I realized two things. First, that decolonization and campaigns for global justice were not themselves delegitimized by such madness any more than the horrors of the Soviet Union were delegitimizing socialism. Secondly, that although, like Jean Améry, I will always be a leftist, I can henceforth play no role among those on the left who agree with Butler, and that the rest of my life will one way or another be spent in caustic dialogue with him. (1)
Anything else I can give from now on will be largely about making sure that “this is what liberation looks like” in response to October 7th becomes the Kronstadt of this generation.
***
Even though many articles have been written over the past eight months condemning the left's numerous pseudo-revolutionary murders - and many of them are very good - I have turned to Amery more than anyone else during this time. And this despite the fact that the great man committed suicide in a Salzburg apartment in 1978. The most recent of the essays was written in the same year, but Améry foresaw it all, and with greater insight and clarity than those who have actually lived through the last 45 years. As Alvin Rosenfeld writes in the introduction to the collection, “the future of the left, indeed its very existence, was threatened by two developments in the late 1960s: a tendency ... to align itself with violent fringe groups, and a fixation on dialectics and social theory as absolutes.”
Amerie did not live to see the moment when he moved from the periphery to the central stage, and the fixation grew into obsession: for his sake I am rather glad for this, although the rest have lost a lot due to his absence. Shani Luk, as we have known since late last year, did not live long after the Hamas siege of the Nova Music Festival on October 7th; She was most likely not alive when Ali Mahmoud's camera captured forever her lifeless, scantily clad body in the back seat of a Hamas jeep. At the end of November, her family, who had behaved with inhuman grace and dignity throughout, were informed that a fragment of Luk's skull had been found, part of the skull, damage to which would make survival impossible. For six months, which must have lasted forever, they were not allowed to know about her body.
The humiliation that Luk suffered after death pales in comparison to the cardinal sin - the extinction of her cruelly shortened and, by all accounts, full and tender life. However, they are deep.
Mahmoud's obscenely intrusive camera first deprived her of the post-death privacy to which all the dead are entitled (and, of course, increased the torment of her family). The opportunity to take such an iconic, prize-winning , and likely lucrative photo of Mahmoud was given to her by two Hamas thugs who shared the open back of a jeep with her corpse on the way back to Gaza: one bastard clutching one of her dreadlocks as an ugly trophy, the other holding a grenade launcher with his boot on her back, the most egregious display of human contempt I think I've ever seen. (2)
So much for the degradation of Shani's personality. The degradation of her memory began almost immediately after the image went viral, and in a Western context almost exclusively by the “left,” whose cherished theories either refused to accept that there was any tragedy involved in her murder, or that it was actually quite remarkable.
What Ameri saw
Since I'm sometimes guilty of diluting outrage with irony, let's be very clear about what happened and what continues to happen. Many on the left justified or, on the contrary, openly celebrated the events as something akin to the actions of the Einsatzgruppen .
Yes, the left is my house, the house of Ameri and, by all accounts, the house of Luk; and that part of the political spectrum in which, in the words of the Viennese critic Alfred Polgar, “the heart of humanity beats.” Don't let their high-flown post-colonial rhetoric hide the ugly reality: they glorified mass murder and rape.
That's why I found myself next to Ameri when the news arrived at such terrifying timing (3), and why he and Shani, I believe, will remain synonymous for me in the future. After all, Amery has always maintained, although he admitted at the time of writing that he could not prove it, that the anti-Zionist left is at best complacent and at worst enthusiastic about the prospect of a second Jewish genocide. The reaction of much of the distant or anti-Zionist left to the events of the Black Sabbath would have eliminated all of Ameri's doubts. “Where barbarism begins, even existential obligations must end,” he wrote elsewhere: not a bad credo for leftist solidarity with armed resistance. But no, no, Jean: for an anti-Zionist, where barbarism begins, fun can begin.
That the disgrace of the far left is not particularly new is evidenced by Améry's preoccupation with the issue in the years leading up to his suicide. Already in 1969, Amery noted that the anti-Zionist obsession not only accompanies, but is also an integral part of the worldview of the “new left.” What “in the past... was considered the socialism of fools ,” he wrote, had by that time “turned into an integrative component of socialism as such, and socialists of their own free will are turning themselves into fools everywhere.” (It took the extraordinary David Nirenberg and his book Anti-Judaism to illustrate that there are, in fact, very few aspects of Western civilization to which anti-Semitism is not “integral.”)
That the situation developed, and what is now full-blown gangrene, in Améry's time was a well-protracted but not complete poisoning of the body politic, Améry himself makes clear to us from beyond the grave. Reflecting on the left's shift from anti-fascist to supposedly anti-colonialism, he wrote in 1976: “Just a moment ago it seemed natural to support the Israeli right to their own state. What is suddenly striking is the fact that this support has become a real test of courage. Indeed, tomorrow it may well be considered positively offensive.” This tomorrow has come a long time ago, Jean, and it is offensive to a large, active and influential part of leftist thought.
Leftists who would justify the fascists
Much has already been written about the fall disgrace of the left in 2023, but it was so deep - and so deep it still is - that there can be no question of oversaturation. It's a betrayal that I can't and won't forget, and if I'm a little belated in noticing it, it's because for some of us the path between heartbreak and wholeness is a little longer than for others.
The fact that this was a betrayal of the intelligentsia, as the French philosopher Julien Benda understood it, is even worse. It did not appear out of a cold blue sky, and its consequences also extend far beyond the borders of Israel and the Palestinian territories. For the second time in three years, the left was faced with an unapologetically fascist enemy. And in both cases, most of them chose the side of the fascists.
The anti-Zionist left's reaction to Russia's attempt to cut off Ukraine was in some respects even worse than its reaction to October 7th, even though they share a similar taste for oppressive security forces. Not every generation of leftists faces such a clear and unambiguous case of reactionary aggression. Orwell's generation faced it more than once: then many also lacked his fortitude to look it straight in the face. As good and brave left-liberal writers such as Timothy Snyder , Timothy Garton-Asche and Paul Mason have repeatedly warned , the same cohort that celebrated or otherwise justified the Hamas pogrom will also sacrifice the valiant people of Ukraine on the altar of a banal, vapid anti-Westernism that deems virtuous anything that purports to be “anti-imperialism.”
Of course, these are the same people who served as Assad's useful idiots ten years ago when he began the mass destruction of his own people. (For a worthy alternative example of a far-left movement, note how the UK's Alliance for Workers Liverty strongly supported the people of Ukraine, strongly condemned Hamas and protested Israel's war in Gaza).
It is not surprising that the left is so indifferent to the prospect of a Trump victory that it is advocating abandoning Biden and handing victory to the greatest threat to the Western order since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Trump at least had the nobility to state quite transparently that he would sacrifice the Ukrainians for the simple reason that he didn’t care. These leftists have the audacity to try to cover up their sacrifice of the heroic struggle of a sovereign people with the respectable garb of a desire for “peace.” The Ukrainian people know what kind of peace this will be, and that, as Rousseau said, “peace can be found in the dungeons.”
Rejoicing at the pogrom
I ask the reader: after each of the examples below, let you digest these words along with the image of a bow on a truck. I know that by asking you to do this, I am invading much of her privacy and dignity, and I ask that you forgive her: she deserves better than to be used as a prop to illustrate the horrors of those who rejoiced in her death.
In the same way, I know that each of the 1,189 killed and each of the 252 hostages, 37 of whom are now also considered dead, is its own unique and equal tragedy. But, quite appropriately for an essay on the left that can accurately be described as Stalinist, there is some truth in the monster's maxim that if one death is a tragedy, then mass death becomes a statistic. I would not give the reader such a way out, but would force him to look directly into the face of the tragedy in the person of Shani.
There was something about the Nova massacre that particularly thrilled the anti-Zionist left, as well as something that horrified us all. Although I never enjoyed it myself, I always found something joyful and life-affirming in others' shared acts of youthful hedonism—young people united, if only temporarily, in a pleasant abandon and satisfaction simply in being alive and together.
The killers entered the scene, killing, raping and dismembering with the same joyful abandon. It is this combination of innocent and evil pleasure that I find so sickeningly unforgettable. “Where there is dance, there is the devil,” said John Chrysostom, the father of the Christian church, who in many ways was the original anti-Semite . He meant the same thing that all pious totalitarians mean by limiting pleasures, but in the Nova, Chrysostom's words took on a much more literal precision.
Many did not see anything so terrible in Nova, quite the opposite. Shani Look and her comrades had not yet cooled down when, on October 7th, UC Merced Associate Professor of History and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Sean Malloy retweeted the following comment from @dunksdeux about the brutal massacre of Look and other hedonistic youths at the Nova Festival:
Imagine drinking an $18 soda called Butterfly Mist, drinking the worst molly ever created, and listening to EDM from the Bush administration when Hamas guys start falling from the sky. crap like that in the Old Testament meant God was mad at you.
Take a break and let this nasty, lazy pose work on you... and now join me in getting the same.
Luk's body was dragged back to Gaza, spat upon, and put away in God knows where by the time the speaker at the New York All for Palestine bacchanal on October 8th offered the following to the screaming crowd : "As you could see, there was some kind of rave or party in the desert where they were having a great time until the resistance came in on electrified hang gliders and took away at least a few dozen hipsters." (It was a swastika protest by the Democratic Socialists of America. And how I cried with the ghosts of Michael Harrington and Irving Howe.) (4)
Notice the excitement in both reactions. These innocent young men were not just expendable materials, eggs whose breaking contributed to the preparation of the great liberation omelette. That would be terrible enough. But no, there is real joy here, real pleasure in the slaughter as an antiseptic cleansing. It's not only "they must die" but also "they deserve to die." At the same time, it goes beyond the standard left-radical dogma and moves into the language of “Untermensch”.
It is in vain that we and their families declare the innocence of those killed, raped and abducted. “Settlers are not civilians. It’s not difficult,” tweeted Zarina Grewal, assistant professor of American studies, ethnicity, race and migration, and religious studies at Yale University. When I first picked up my jaw from the floor when I saw this tweet, my mind immediately went back to memories of the American pragmatist philosopher Sidney Hook. In 1935, Bertolt Brecht, who was at the time the most revered playwright and socialist in Europe, visited Hook in New York. The conversation, as was customary in left-wing circles in those days, turned to the Moscow trial. Hook expressed his opinion about the horror of shooting innocent comrades, to which Brecht allegedly replied: “The more innocent they are, the more they deserve to be shot.” Convinced that he had understood the great playwright correctly, Hook immediately reprimanded him ; also correct. The question should be debatable, but which of the more than 1,189 dead and 252 abducted did Grewal call “settlers”? Answer: All Israelites are settlers, and in Grewal's view, they are all ripe for slaughter.
Academician Balazs Berkowitz summed up this type of denial of the victim status of the Israelis quite accurately and with quite appropriate horror. “Not recognizing the victim status of Israelis and Jews is doubly anti-Semitism,” he wrote:
it not only rests on anti-Semitic premises, but also has the potential to lead to the most extreme anti-Semitic consequences. This view essentially dehumanizes Jews by presenting them as incapable of becoming victims. Consequently, she rationalizes any harm he causes, since the concepts of “Jew” and “victim” are seen as mutually exclusive. This view also opens the door to justification and potential approval of all future acts of violence against them. On the contrary, such thinking automatically justifies even the most inhuman and barbaric enemies, who in any other context would be considered the enemies of all humanity. This is worse than Holocaust denial: it is an open justification for all potential Holocausts."
Thus, the life of Luk, who was just a demonstrably gentle and decent person (and, by the way, a conscientious objector), meant nothing. And, not being accepted as one of the unfortunates on earth - and the Jews are never such - she can be killed, and her body humiliated, and not only with impunity, but also with glory.
New joys followed, and from more eminent sources than Malloy. Joseph Massad, a professor of modern Arab politics and intellectual history at Columbia University, had a full day to process the incident when he said : “Perhaps the main achievement of the resistance in temporarily taking over these settler colonies is a fatal blow to any confidence the Israeli colonists had in their army and its ability to protect them.”
Russell Rickford, an associate professor of history at Cornell University, thought even further, asking at a protest on October 15th: “What did Hamas do?” In response he said:
“Hamas has changed the balance of power. Hamas has destroyed the illusion of invincibility. That's what they did. You don't have to be a Hamas supporter to admit this. Hamas changed the terms of the debate. Israeli officials are right: nothing will be the same. Nothing will ever be the same again. Hamas has challenged its monopoly on violence."
He continued:
And in those first few hours - even while terrible acts were being committed, many of which we will only learn about later, there were many thousands of people of good will, many Palestinians, conscientious, rejecting violence - like you, like me - rejecting attacks on civilians - like you, like me - who could breathe! They were able to breathe for the first time in many years! It was exciting. It was exciting, it was energizing. And if they were not inspired by this challenge to the monopoly of violence, this shift in the balance of power, then they would not be human. I was delighted."
(I quote Rickford in full because many did not, for reasons of fairness and because his professed abhorrence of violence against civilians does not do much justice to it in any case).
I don't know if the intoxication had already passed, or if these ghouls felt the same excitement when looking at the footage recently published by the families of IDF observers Liri Albag, Karina Ariev, Agam Berger, Daniella Gilboa and Naama Levy, abducted from the Nahal Oz base. (I'm posting a link to the video here , deliberately not linking to the viral photo of Shani Luk, for the simple reason that the families of these five women want it to be shown as often as possible to remind the world and their own government of their desperate situation.) In it, five young women dressed in pajamas, none of them out of their teens and three visibly bloodied, are shown in complete horror. There's a moment in the film where Berger looks at the camera with one of the most pitiful expressions I can remember on her face. It haunts me. These were the most terrible and guilty apparatchiks of the all-powerful Zionist entity, who fell prostrate before the brave rebels. (A note about how the horror of October 7th is such a carefully and narcissistically filmed self-indignation: we watch Naama Levy's October 7th play out like a horror film directed by Christopher Nolan. For the last eight months, we saw the last of her before her capture: she was dragged by her hair into a jeep soaked in blood, while crowds rushed screaming to watch her suffer. Now, after eight months of her hell, we see moments that happened a few hours before).
These are professors, and not only them. Being an academic is both a great privilege and a great responsibility as it allows us to shape young minds. Perhaps this role has been so vulgarized that it is convenient for such teachers to encourage the rioters, joyfully imitate a Cossack mother inciting the crowd with a pitchfork?
The leftist fetish for “revolutionary” violence is, of course, not new. Fanon is currently in vogue, but the same can be found in the work of much earlier Marxists: Georges Sorel, for whom violence was a vital proletarian impulse, going far beyond the understanding of humanistic rationalism of what he contemptuously called “bourgeois philosophy.” Or the Peruvian Marxist H. C. Mariategui, who wrote, condemning the moderation of the Second International: “If revolution requires violence, power, discipline, then I am for violence, power, discipline. I accept them in bloc form, with all their horrors, without any cowardly reservations.” The fanonist postcolonial emphasis had certainly emerged by the time Tariq Ali, himself a participant in street fighting, spoke enthusiastically in 2006 about the rise to power of Muqtada, Haniyeh, Nasrallah, Ahmadinejad, that “the radical wind blows from the alleys and shacks of the last days of the wretched people of the earth.” The radicalism, of course, was that this rogue gallery was "anti-Western" and also unsqueamish enough to resist the concerns of polite "bourgeois philosophy."
In the same vein, October 7th arrived and some were shocked that we were shocked. Najma Sharif, an American writer, tweeted : “What do you think decolonization means? Vibes? Papers? Essay? Losers” is a demotic echo of Robespierre’s response to the Girondinist Louvet’s complaint about the excessiveness of terror: “Did you want a revolution without a revolution?” (And was there a touch of Madame Defarge from A Tale of Two Cities in celebrating the executions in real time on Twitter?)
In the week of October 7, it also became apparent how much the massacre for some was not about real people and their murder, but rather about pseudo-scientific dialectics. I'm somehow both chilled to the core and reaching for a painkiller when I (re)read the following post from Harper's magazine editor Lake Meek on October 8th:
“The search for an analogue seems almost irrelevant to the world-historical (!) courage of the Palestinians in seizing the components of self-determination for themselves, if only because the idiom of liberation reinvents itself every time the yoke of slavery is thrown off... we have not seen anything like it, even when we have, that is my opinion. What it is and what it is not exists in such a tangle that a historical example can only be partly useful. But the modern assessment is unambiguous: the righteousness of causes and the singularity of circumstances are indissoluble... Attempts at ethnic realization for almost a century, the search for existential breadth - all this results in radical actions that do not need an apology. There is power in developing a story; its inertia and forward movement require a certain impulse.”
It's like reading Lenin on a bad day (and he had a lot of them), the nastyness of the message matched only by the thundering leadenness of the prose. Behind the impenetrable jargon one can discern at least some meaning: dead Jews are nothing compared to the “roar of history.” (Shout out to @primalpoly for his response to Micah : “You're defending mass rape by terrorists. Maybe take a step back from your polysyllabic pretentiousness and look at the reality of what you're defending?” More kudos to @StonewallArthur, who settled for the “What the fuck are you talking about?!” meme).
Some were not content to enjoy the bloodshed remotely, but seemed intent on joining in. Gemma DeCristo, an assistant professor of American studies at the University of California, Davis, tweeted on October 10 that "Zionist journalists" have "homes and addresses, kids in school... They may be afraid of their bosses, but they should be more afraid of us." At the end of the tweet, emojis depicting a knife, an ax and drops of blood were placed.
You don't need to understand the impenetrable semiotics that the postmodern left substitutes for real moral philosophy to understand the inevitable implication of all this: the only good Israeli is a dead Israeli, and any dead Israeli is good.
I'll leave the examples here, giving the reader just a taste of the activist-intellectual response and sparing him the thousands and thousands of tweets, etc. from "average Joes" written in the same vein. (And that's just a taste. If you want to be even more depressed, first read Alan Johnson's article "Progressives and the Hamas Pogrom: From A to Z" (5), and other collections, only from Fathom. (6)
I also do not single out the mentioned individuals as any outstanding ones. On the contrary, I note that their contributions are rather representative of a broader phenomenon. The inevitable conclusion follows: this is a movement and a caste of minds that have lost even the slightest connection with the compassion and basic decency that form the basis of any properly constructed left politics.
Just one step below the “cheerleaders” were the “ show me the proof ” rape deniers and those who suddenly became experts on the “ Hannibal Protocol .” The mindset here is remarkably similar to previous cases of what used to be called useful idiocy. The great Polish historian of Marxism, Leszek Kolakowski, noted that anyone in the West who told the pro-Soviet left that there were concentration camps in their homeland was immediately labeled a “Cold Warrior.” And since such a “warrior” is by definition wrong, therefore, there were no camps in the Soviet Union. (Bernard Shaw was a prominent and early spokesman for this disease: according to him, there could be no famine in the Soviet Union, since he had never eaten as well as during his visit there). Likewise, those who tried to amplify the voice of the Israeli women's movement by calling attention to the large-scale sexual violence of October 7th are, of course, “Zionists.” And since all Zionists are vile liars, there was no sexual violence.
I honestly don't know if the deniers believe their denials or if this is just a case of God not being allowed to fail. If the Palestinian cause is considered righteous - and of course it is - then it can only remain righteous if all the evil done in the name of that cause is denied. This idea is, of course, ridiculous, but perhaps Nietzsche was right in believing that “man’s dishonesty with himself is his greatest enemy. When he makes a mistake, his memory admits, “I did it,” but his pride resists, saying, “I couldn’t do it,” and pride overcomes memory.”
As always, Orwell was certainly right when he observed that “atrocities are believed or not believed solely on account of political predilections. Everyone believes in the atrocities of the enemy and does not believe in the atrocities of his own side, without bothering to study the evidence.” He had seen many such cases and did not want anything like this. “These things really happened, that’s what we need to pay attention to,” Orwell insisted. And "they happened even if the Earl of Halifax said they happened." This means that something is not a piece of propaganda just because an opponent or enemy claims it to be true. I fully agree with this and can perhaps take some modest credit for insisting to the Israelis on three occasions that the disgraceful methods and odious arguments in the conduct of the war in Gaza must be reconsidered. (7) What Orwell would have made of Yannis Varoufakis, the former Greek finance minister and hero of the anti-NATO left, who assures us that “the criminals here are not Hamas... the criminals are Europeans” is not difficult to guess.
Not that anti-Zionists care, but the shock and betrayal felt by the Israeli left is still palpable. Much of the anti-occupation left, like me, supported Israel's responsibility to fight Hamas, but not the waging of war. “ All I want to say to the international left is to go to hell, ” under such a not unreasonable headline, the Israeli writer Lilach Volach wrote her “cri de coeur” at the end of October in the ultra-peacekeeping newspaper Haaretz. When I interviewed Fania Oz-Salzberger in early April, she was still in shock and consoled only by the solidarity she was receiving from the older social democratic left.
Hebrew University professor Eva Illouz made it clear in her excellent article that, judging by their response to the massacre, Israelis opposed to the occupation must now turn to Arab Israelis, who “have shown the compassion that the doctrinaire left has sorely lacked. They took our side. It is with them that we must create a party of humanity that will strive for justice and peace. The global left no longer matters." (The anti-occupation left should have been more oriented toward Arab Israelis long ago, but that's another matter.)
Cooperation and the utilitarian ethic are not their strong suit, and anti-Zionists have as little interest in supporting potential comrades in Israel as they do in genuine peace and the hard work it requires. In their own words, they are quite clear that any practical or moderate two-state idea is too much for them and that nothing short of destroying the State of Israel will satisfy their appetite (though they are so obsessed that they would miss it if it didn't exist).
They cheer on the Palestinians, from a safe distance of course, until the complete reconquest of Palestine, which is hate speech because of the inevitability of murder and doubly because of complete nonsense. Israeli anti-occupation leftists are nobodies and nonentities, the useful idiots of Zionism, while brave activists like the members of Standing Together fail the purity test as Quisling normalizers.
On campus
If there is so much of this infernal nonsense in academia, is it any wonder when it seeps into the student body? Of course, emerging minds should not be judged by the same standards as fully formed ones, and I do not want to fish in a trawler net when anti-Semitism always requires a long line. Many people actively protesting the war in Gaza are simply furious and heartbroken as they endure a truly brutal eight-month conflict, and the outrage over the destruction of Gaza speaks well of them. Except, one might say, in those cases when it is accompanied by denial, evasion or outright glee about October 7th or obvious support for Hamas. Then can we not rightly conclude that these protesters are driven not by a humanistic desire for peace, justice and an end to bloodshed, but by the prospect of a repetition and repetition of October 7th?
Amery was quite merciful to the youthful naivety of those who in his time mirrored many of today's campus protesters. “Young leftists are likely to scorn the suggestion that their anti-Zionism contains elements of crude anti-Semitism, and quite rightly... However, as our young future Marx experts should know, in an objective historical situation, individual intentions and goals as such mean little. The seedbed in which the young leftists operate with their anti-Zionist furor is nurturing the shoots of centuries-old anti-Semitism that has not been “mastered.” Somewhere, every “down with Zionist oppression” finds a response that sounds surprisingly similar to “perish Judas!”
We can even admit that there is some naivety in this, even a certain amount of playing fedayeen. After all, it's much easier to celebrate the intifada if you haven't lived through the campaign of mass murder that accompanied its second iteration or the harsh Israeli crackdown on Protective Shield. Yes, these are very Western manifestations; “A violent revolution turns into a myth,” Améry notes, “only where, for compelling reasons, it cannot and will not happen...” In such cases, “an armed uprising in the name of human liberation turns into a petrified myth and an aestheticized slogan.”
But Améry also knew that “stupidity is not always harmless,” so forgive us if we do not treat such complacent, even laudatory, chants as: “We don’t want two states, we want 1948”; "No justice, no peace..." “Intifada, intifada, globalization of intifada”; “Long live Palestine, Palestine forever, from the river to the sea”; “Red, black, green and white, we support the fight of Hamas”; “Hitler, Hitler, come home! Palestine belongs only to us"; “Al-Qassam, you make us proud, kill another soldier!”; “Say it loud, say it clearly: we don’t want Zionists here”; "Resistance by any means"; “Palestine is our demand! No peace on stolen land"; "We say 'justice.' You say “how”? Burn Tel Aviv to the ground!
In an era of microaggressions—a neologism that I view far more favorably than almost everyone on the “pro-Israel” side—can we conclude that this aggression is more than just a microaggression, and that it is egregious to ask Jewish students to bypass these deafening cauldrons just to get their (extremely expensive) education?
This war has truly become a horror show, and Sunday's murderous inferno at the makeshift camp in Rafah is the final, utterly and depressingly predictable agony. It is being carried out at the political level by fools and fools who do not care about the lives of the people of Gaza or about any coherent strategy. I unconditionally support its beginning and equally unconditionally hate its continuation, and I have already stated this three times publicly, in print.
I cannot join the protesters on the barricades for the simple reason that too many of them directly sanctioned the murder of my friends. It's pretty basic, actually. If I had encountered Columbia student protest leader Himani James, it would have been self-interest as well as fraternal solidarity that would have driven me to flee. After all, James would have killed me too. “Zionists don’t deserve to live,” you see . Джеймс уверяет нас, что «я дерусь не для того, чтобы ранить или чтобы был победитель или проигравший, я дерусь, чтобы убить», но меня не слишком успокаивает мысль о том, что мой конец будет быстрым. Дисциплинарная комиссия Колумбийского университета, перед которой Джеймс произнёс эти слова, видимо, была обеспокоена меньше, чем я, поскольку они приняли меры только после того, как ролик стал вирусным .
Покажите мне протест, который в равной степени ненавидит войну и ХАМАС; который отчаянно стремится к свободной Палестине наряду с безопасным Израилем; который обладает моральной чистотой и верой в святость всех невинных жизней: я приду туда с плакатом в руках в мгновение ока. Такого протеста не было, потому что в настоящее время нет антивоенных левых, способных на него. Заметка для них: если вы хотите увидеть, как это делается, следите за экстраординарным писателем из Газы в изгнании Ахмедом Фуадом Альхатибом . На сегодняшний день Альхатиб потерял 31 члена своей семьи, и ему удаётся ненавидеть и протестовать против войны, одновременно выступая против зла ХАМАСа, и, следовательно, наживая себе много врагов среди других предполагаемых сторонников палестинского дела, которые оправдывают 7–го октября. Это действительно нравственная позиция.
Левые, на которых может положиться Шани
Путь к этой убогой реакции на 7-го октября был долгим, со многими катастрофическими поворотами, ведущими крайне левых на все более опасную и обанкротившуюся территорию. Так бывает, когда догма становится более модной, чем критическое мышление; когда радикализм берет верх над разумом; когда противоядием от ориентализма становится оксидентализм; когда противодействием культурному империализму становится моральный релятивизм; когда «лучше ошибаться с Сартром, чем быть правым с Ароном»; когда Фуко решает за всех нас, что иранские женщины и иранские демократы могут идти в ад — аятолла, в конце концов, просто слишком чертовски интересен .
Да, нынешнее болото питали бесчисленные фекальные притоки. Так и оно неизбежно становится все более и более загрязненным. Поколения, воспитанные на болтовне, выдаваемой за глубокомыслие, и на нигилизме, выдаваемом за радикальный шик. Это новое поколение намного превзошло Батлер как по иррациональности, так и по откровенности своего презрения к жизни израильтян. Батлер, по крайней мере, предложила осуждение 7-го октября (хотя это всё ещё было «вооружённое сопротивление», а не «терроризм»), но обнаружила, что чудовище, в создании которого она сыграла немалую роль, теперь считает это скорее отговорками. И ваши сыновья и ваши дочери не подвластны вам…
Да, левым 21-го века нужны были дети Виктора Сержа и Софи Шолль, доктора Кинга и Ная Бевена . Но слишком часто вместо этого они получали детей Нечаева и Че, Мао и Ульрики Майнхоф. Для многих эта измена привела к самоизгнанию, самоотчуждению от левых. Для меня, как и для Амери до меня, это невозможно. Способны ли мы на последовательное возрождение, ещё предстоит выяснить. Это сизифова задача, которую, как показало 7-го октября, нельзя оставлять на усмотрение привратников. Нет, как отметил Амери, «ответ должен исходить не столько от тех, кто занимает ответственные посты, сколько от тех, кто обладает реальным чувством ответственности». Если хотите, согласитесь с Оруэллом, что ответ зависит от работяг.
Ожидание может оказаться долгим. А пока я бы посоветовал начинающим левым, которые чувствуют во всем этом что-то неладное, но не совсем уверены, с чего начать, начать с адаптации знаменитого предложения раввина Гринберга. После Холокоста, сказал раввин, «не следует делать никаких заявлений, теологических или иных, которые не были бы убедительными в присутствии горящих детей». Так вот, отныне ни одно заявление левых по поводу израильско-палестинского конфликта не заслуживает доверия, если оно было сделано в грузовике с Шани. Это лучшее, а может быть, и все, что вы можете сделать для неё сейчас
Notes:
1) На самом деле путь к Кронштадту начался немного раньше, когда на фоне ада, в который погрузился Ирак в результате межконфессионального восстания в середине 2000-х, мне стало ясно, что многие из тех, с кем я шёл против англо-американской войны, похоже, не столько сокрушались о том, что их предупреждения оправдались, сколько действительно желали победы джихадистским повстанцам .
2) Редактор Fathom Алан Джонсон напомнил мне, что эта отвратительная деградация также заставляет вспомнить момент из романа Примо Леви «Человек ли это?», в котором офицер СС вытирает руки о Леви, словно о тряпку.
3) Нежелательные случайности продолжались: когда я начал писать этот очерк, пришло известие о том, что найдено тело бойфренда Лук, Ориона Эрнандеса Раду.
4) Оба они были демократическими социалистами, Харрингтон основал DSA, а Хоу был одним из его самых выдающихся членов. Оба, я уверен, были бы потрясены поведением некогда почтенной организации после 7-го октября.
5) Джонсон впервые опубликовал этот сборник апологии ХАМАСа 9-го октября. Он продолжал пополнять его, пока не пришел к мудрому выводу, что такой поток подобных материалов скоро превратится в постоянную работу.
6) См., например: https://fathomjournal.org/opinion-why-dont-israeli-women-count-for-un-women/ ;
https://fathomjournal.org/after-the-pogrom-an-australian-journalist-reflects/ ;
https://fathomjournal.org/eat-their-skulls-the-pleasures-of-antisemitism-updated-after-7-october/ ;
https://fathomjournal.org/universities-in-crisis-glorifying-atrocities-the-case-of-brown-university/
7) См. Alan Johnson & Jack Omer-Jackaman, 'Opinion | For the Total Defeat of Hamas, Against the “Total Siege” of Gaza' , Fathom , October 2023; Jack Omer-Jackaman, 'What Justice Requires in Gaza' , Persuasion , 13 December 2023; Jack Omer-Jackaman, 'Opinion | Yes to recognising a Palestinian state now' , Fathom , March 2024.