The global left, where Hamas supposedly has friends, has been the target of criticism from the Jewish left since the October 7 massacre, when the terrorist group, in the words of writer and columnist Eva Illouz, “committed war crimes and irrefutable crimes” against the Humanity” “atrocities” that are even more heinous because of “the pride with which they were committed, the willingness to take responsibility and the recording and publication of beheadings and desecration of corpses” of defenseless Jews.
Eva, professor of sociology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and at the School of Advanced Studies in Social Sciences in Paris, deepens the critical analysis of leftwing demonstrations in view of the attack on Israel in an article published on November 2nd in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz Israel the country’s military response, pointing out the methods, indifference, lack of compassion and future irrelevance of the representatives of her supposed ideological camp (in the introduction to the text she even speaks of “many leftwing Jews like me”).
Read the main excerpts below, translated by Antagonista:
“Much of the international left which has defended equality, freedom and dignity for two centuries celebrated the news of the massacre as an uprising against the colonizers or rejected it with embarrassing intellectual strategies. The left mocked, defected, ignored, and left vulnerable Jews around the world branded with the curse of Cain.
In France, the New AntiCapitalism Party It is the postcolonial movement Indigeniste de la Republique celebrated the massacre as a heroic resistance by Hamas fighters.
In the USA, 33 Harvard student groups gave their advocacy of the massacres a more intellectual tone. They shifted responsibility for the massacre of 1,400 Israelis right on Israel’s doorstep. The first statement from Harvard University’s Palestine Solidarity Committee (which has been adopted by many other nonPalestinian groups) is revealing.
“Today’s events did not occur in a vacuum,” the statement said. “Over the past two decades, millions of Palestinians in Gaza have been forced to live in an openair prison. The Israeli authorities promise to “open the gates of hell,” and the massacres in Gaza have already begun. The apartheid regime is solely to blame.”
The perpetrators were immediately and automatically declared innocent of the massacre of the Jews. Because of their association with Israel, the dead Jews were responsible for their own deaths. The reaction of universities, intellectuals and artists around the world repeated with monotonous uniformity the same position. Israel was the true and only culprit.
‘One Open letter from the artist community to cultural organizations”, Published on Art Forum signed on October 19th and signed by several thousand people (including). ‘Intellectuals’ as Judith Butler) condemned the “complicity of our government agencies in serious human rights violations and war crimes.” One might think that the outrage was motivated by the indiscriminate and brutal killing of Israeli civilians. However, the signatories’ sympathy was directed exclusively at the displaced Palestinians and victims of Israeli retaliatory attacks. The Artforum letter repeatedly called this and only this genocide.
The loss of Israeli civilian lives did not deserve a single mention, even though its main cause was Israeli “oppression and occupation.” The Israelis themselves caused the genocidal pogrom. UN Secretary General Antonio Guterresjoined the chorus, using (probably unknowingly) the same words as the Harvard Palestine Solidarity Committee when it said the massacre of 1,400 people “did not take place in a vacuum.”
In the opening speech of the Frankfurt Book Fair Slavoj Zizek presented the final variation on the same theme. He superficially acknowledged the massacres (thanks, Slavoj!), but like everyone else, pointed out the need to understand their root causes. Although Zizek did not explicitly blame Israel for the massacre, he performed a variation of the song “It’s the Context, Stupid!” He equated Hamas with Netanyahu because they claimed presumably just as criminally an exclusive right to the land of Palestine ( or) having Israel. He said he wanted to compare the two to clarify the events.
Zizek misused the word “comparison,” which implies awareness of both similarities and differences. Instead, he drew analogies between the Israeli leadership and Hamas, an analytical strategy (if you can call it that) that is quite different from comparison.
For him, Palestinian and Israeli history run parallel and reflect each other. The left’s response to the events was disgustingly simple and amounted to blaming the Israelis for the tragedy. It took the form of various clichés, such as “violence requires violence,” “there is a context,” and “all fanatics are equal.”
From the joy expressed at the massacre of the Jews (which was perceived as heroic resistance) to the hypocritical criticism of intellectuals (“The massacres should be condemned, but they are understandable”), The Left has been extraordinarily indifferent to the panic, fear and shock that has gripped the Jewish world.
But I don’t want to talk here about the irreparable damage suffered by Jews, who experienced antiSemitism on a global scale not seen since the Second World War. I’d rather explain why These intellectual responses are morally and intellectually bankrupt and why is it like that endanger the left and especially the fight against the occupation.
Smart intellectuals like Zizek draw elegant parallels and equivalences between Hamas and Israel. But ordinary people are usually immune to this kind of simplification. They insist on the concrete uniqueness of their experience. (…) The concrete memory of each group refuses the language of equivalences.
There is a second reason why we should reject the intellectual comparison exercise: this Lazy “fanatics are all the same” approach. Moral intuition, common law and international law clearly distinguish between different types of killing.
Collateral damage—a frighteningly impersonal term—differs morally and legally from the beheading of children by combatants because of the degree of intent and direct responsibility. Denying this distinction would be tantamount to denying the foundations of our legal system.
Likewise, the “heinous crime” category refers to crimes that human communities recognize as distinct because of their heinous nature. A quantitative count of deaths is never sufficient to determine how morally repugnant an act of killing is, because Crimes are not equal in terms of intent, responsibility and heinousness.
The third reason for this the approach “It takes two to tango” is fundamentally wrong treats an infinite number of events as if they were about a single narrative: colonialism. A single plot explains the behavior of all characters, each horror mechanically mirroring the other.
But There are multiple narratives that overlap and are interpreted simultaneously without any strong or awkward connection. We have, for example, a terrible colonial struggle that has taken place in the last century between the Jews and the native Palestinian Arabs, and in parallel the genocidal intent of Hamas, a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood that has developed a rabid antiSemitism and brutal treatment of its own Palestinians Population.
It is precisely the fact that these narratives contradict each other and do not offer a single narrative or two mirrored narratives that makes it so easy to say: “I am disgusted by the October 7 massacres, and I want the Palestinians to be too .’their state itself.’ The “there is a context” strategy is lazy because it does not allow for the possibility that narratives can be separated from each other, that one does not explain the other.
There is one final reason why Zizek’s (and many others’) intellectual strategy is sloppy. If we use “context” as an analytical tool for explaining and understanding, how far should context go?
Should we, for example, invoke the context of murderous antiSemitism that gave birth to Zionism and so drastically distinguished it from all forms of settler colonialism? Should we include in our context the fact that the Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin AlHusseini, supported the Nazis and their Final Solution and that the loss of Palestine was therefore part of the redrawing of the maps after World War II?
I am not defending this position, but that is precisely my position: I am not defending it precisely because I refuse to “contextualize” the Palestinian pain over the loss of their land. To truly appreciate and understand your tragedy and fully respect your loss, I must remove the context. I ask you to do the same for me.
Many Arabs inside and outside Israel have demonstrated the compassion that the doctrinaire left so shockingly lacks. They were by our side. With them we must build a party of humanity determined to bring justice and peace. The global left has now become irrelevant.”
The antagonist does not have to agree with the Jewish Left on everything else to recognize that, unlike the rest of the global Left, it is firmly tied to civilization.
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