In Dissent, first Joshua Leifer:
In the face of this slaughter, parts of the Anglophone left have reacted with shocking inhumanity. Progressive journalists proclaimed “glory” to the Hamas fighters or announced a day of “celebration.” Lawyers who make their careers criticizing Israel’s violations of international law contorted themselves in defense of Hamas’s war crimes. A prominent writer cruelly tweeted, “what did y’all think decolonization meant? vibes? essays? losers.” Many others, including numerous academics, echoed her implication that this—the massacre of innocent men, women, children, the elderly—was the answer. “Decolonization is not a metaphor,” they declared in a furious chorus. A Yale professor, in a tweet which she later deleted, asserted that a woman taken hostage at the rave was a legitimate target because she had served in the army. A piece published in n+1 dismissed “smarmy moralizing about civilian deaths.” At a protest, briefly endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America, under the banner, “All Out for Palestine,” a speaker grinningly described Hamas’s attack on the rave—“until the resistance came in electrified hang gliders and took at least several dozen hipsters,” he said—to a cheering crowd.
Winant replies:
One way of understanding Israel that I think should not be controversial is to say that it is a machine for the conversion of grief into power. The Zionist dream, born initially from the flames of pogroms and the romantic nationalist aspirations so common to the nineteenth century, became real in the ashes of the Shoah, under the sign “never again.” Commemoration of horrific violence done to Jews, as we all know, is central to what Israel means and the legitimacy that the state holds—the sword and shield in the hands of the Jewish people against reoccurrence. Anyone who has spent time in synagogues anywhere in the world, much less been in Israel for Yom HaShoah or visited Yad Vashem, can recognize this tight linkage between mourning and statehood.
This, on reflection, is a hideous fact. For what it means is that it is not possible to publicly grieve an Israeli Jewish life lost to violence without tithing ideologically to the IDF—whether you like it or not.
Leifer’s response here:
Winant writes “that it is not possible to publicly grieve an Israeli Jewish life lost to violence without tithing ideologically to the IDF—whether you like it or not.” Such a statement is a cruel abstraction, possible only from myopic remove, that misses how real, living Israelis and Palestinians are responding to this moment. It is not very hard to find examples that disprove this facile assertion. Here’s one: on Thursday, Ayman Odeh, who chairs the Arab-Jewish socialist party Hadash, delivered a speech to Israel’s Knesset. Odeh has felt the pain of Israeli apartheid on his own flesh; he has been wounded by its armed forces; he has devoted his life to resisting Israel’s abuses. And yet, as a Palestinian Arab and socialist leader, he was still able to say the following: “There is nothing in the world, not even the cursed occupation, that justifies the killing of innocent civilians.” If Odeh can manage this—under the boot of Israeli oppression, despite calls by Israeli rightists for his deportation and for genocide—then surely Winant and others on the Anglophone anti-imperialist left can, too.