This was my contribution to this eBook, Left Responds, after the Hamas attack on Israel. Although not everyone agreed on all points, what we did agree on is that the standard Leftist response that demonizes Israel is fundamentally antisemitic.
I believe the analysis still stands, especially as in the treatment of Israel like any other state, it is impossible at this point to fail to recognize that the Likud government and the elements aligned with it are looking for nothing less than the ethnic cleansing of Gaza and the West Bank.
The attack in October on Israeli citizens by Hamas and Israel’s response to the attack have once again revealed that a large part of the Left fails to grasp the relation of the nation-state, nationalism and so-called “national liberation” to capital, and simultaneously that antisemitism remains alive as “the socialism of fools.” The failure takes two forms. We see outright support for Hamas as “objectively anti-imperialist” and as an “authentic” Palestinian political force. But we also see a denial to Jewish peoples of the same rights as any other oppressed people.
Hamas launched the attack on October 7, 2023 fully well knowing that this was not a winnable military campaign. Who thinks that Hamas plans to defeat Israel militarily? Not Hamas. Hamas may be a murderously antisemitic, anti-gay, anti-woman, anti-socialist, anti-democratic political organization, but they have not shown themselves to be that stupid. Instead, based on the timing, on the clearly provocative and cruel atrocities, and on the absence of any chance of military success, Hamas likely acted because it fears Israel’s significant efforts to normalize diplomatic and political relations with the Arab states. Hamas’s attack was a performance designed to bait the Likud regime into a response of collective punishment, which is a war crime in international law, ending for the foreseeable future any possible normalization, keeping Palestine as a wedge issue in the Middle East, and keeping Hamas at the political table. By this measure, Hamas won, at the expense of the majority of Palestinians.
Why did Netanyahu’s government take the bait and launch a counter-campaign that would obviously involve war crimes from the perspective of international law and diplomacy, destroy normalization with the Arab regimes, and heap opprobrium on Israel? It should be clear, as it is to many Israeli citizens, that Likud and its far right allied parties have a reactionary agenda designed to use liberal democracy to destroy liberal democracy, just as Netanyahu’s allies, Trump and Putin, do. Therefore, despite the diplomatic inconveniences, October 7 presented an opportunity to justify using the military to both reinforce a policy of apartheid and a policy of collective punishment of Gaza, killing an estimated 14,000+ Palestinians, while trying to silence the increasingly militant internal Israeli opposition to the regime.
If this did not involve Israel, the politics would be clear to leftists. Hamas stands against everything the Left stands for, pursues its agenda by violence against Israelis and Palestinians, worries first and foremost about its position of power at the table, and promotes international antisemitism. Netanyahu’s Likud sees this as an opportunity to pursue the most radical parts of its ultra-conservative agenda and has already killed many times more Palestinians, over half of them women and children, than on October 7. If this did not involve Israel, we would start by condemning Hamas as an enemy of the oppressed and exploited in Gaza and everywhere. Then we would condemn the Likud regime for using Hamas’s pogrom as an excuse for collective punishment of Gazans, calls for ethnic cleansing by its right-wing partners, and as another means to destroy Israeli liberal democracy. Both sides (Hamas and Likud, not Palestinians and Israelis) represent moments of the long rightward shift globally that marks the secular crisis of capital.
But it does involve Israel, so many “anti-imperialists” defend Hamas and argue that the Jews, despite being nearly extinguished as a people in Europe through the Holocaust, are the one oppressed group with no right to a nation-state. Not that “national liberation” solves problems constituted by capital, as the last 70 years have shown, but the issue is the antisemitic hypocrisy of the anti-imperialists, not the effectiveness of a nation-state solution. Leftists cheering Hamas support a fascistic, antisemitic organization that any and all of them would condemn in their own countries.
However, justifying the Likud regime’s actions, as if antisemitism means that the Israeli state is magically outside the laws of capital, and does not behave just like any other capitalist nation-state, is to become apologists for Likud and the ethnic cleansing policies of their Knesset allies, policies that mirror those of their allies like Trump, Putin, et al, in the growing fascist international, who support Netanyahu with one hand and their own native antisemites with the other.
To defend the oppressed and exploited in Palestine and Israel, we must refuse defending Hamas or Likud or anyone who would tell us that murdering children, raping women, blowing up hospitals, murdering homosexuals, stealing people’s land and all the rest of the atrocities will lead to a more free and dignified humanity.
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