As we near October 7th, it is a good moment to discuss the situation of Israel, Palestine and the aporia of both Left antisemitism and apologias for fascist nationalisms in the name of anti-imperialism and Left apologias for Israel's slide, like so many other countries globally, into fascism.
As a start, here is a link to a section of a chapter of a book Kurz wrote in 2003 War for World Order: The End of Sovereignty and the Transformations of Imperialism in the Age of Globalisation, republished on Medium by the account Wertkritik. This essay is important because it clearly documents the profound rise of religio-racist, revanchist forces within Israel and their toxicity already present by the early 2000's and which has become much worse in the subsequent 23 years, while clearly holding to a commitment to Israel as something different, es exemplified in the following paragraph from the article:
"Israel is always both at the same time: on the one hand, a peripheral capitalist state under capitalist conditions in a central crisis region; and on the other hand, a specific product of resistance against antisemitism — the last crisis-ideological reserve of imperialism. Therefore, the statehood of Israel is of a different quality than that of all other states. While the formation of a Palestinian state can no longer lie within the horizon of social emancipation — in this case, the post-state perspective of liberation has already become relevant — the existence and defence of the State of Israel remains a decisive, supporting condition for the constitution of a new type of transnational global emancipation movement: one that does not allow the desire for liberation to be extinguished by the opening of the antisemitic ideological valve. In other words: among all countries, Israel is the one that, within the framework of a new emancipatory world movement, will be the very last to leave behind statehood and “national” existence."
I have posted here a link to my own response to the October 7th attack and what I feared then, that this was not only a barbaric act of a fascist organization, Hamas, but that it would have catastrophic consequences for the Palestinian population because it would provide the excuse Netanyahu and his Ultra allies were looking for to enact a program of ethnic cleansing in Gaza and eventually the West Bank.
And to this very moment Israel, under Likud and the Ultras, conducts this ethnic cleansing to the tune of over 73,000 dead, over 175,000 wounded, for casualties in Gaza alone equaling over 10% of the population from October 2023. Add to this another 1,100 killed and 6,000 wounded in the West Bank. And Israel is not disputing these numbers.
"Several sources, including the Times of Israel and the Guardian, reported that an Israeli security official anonymously briefed journalists last week and had accepted the Gazan Ministry of Health’s (MoH) estimated death toll of more than 70 000 Palestinians killed since 7 October 2023." [BMJ Group report with sources cited]
But this is not the end of the issue. Israel has not only systematically murdered civilians, including large numbers of children (it is estimated that 25-30% of the deaths and about 25% of the wounded), but has also engaged in more or less open murder of relief workers.
According to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), well over 200 journalists and media workers have been killed since the conflict began. The CPJ's annual reports noted that Israel was responsible for a significant majority of global press fatalities in consecutive years, classifying multiple incidents as deliberate targeted killings or "murder". The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) has stated that the mortality rate among Palestinian journalists in Gaza exceeds 10%.
Human rights organizations and United Nations experts report that hundreds of humanitarian aid workers have been killed in Gaza. The deadly strike on a World Central Kitchen (WCK) convoy is one of the most well-known against an organization famed for doing with food what Doctors without Borders does for medical relief. These attacks have drawn widespread international condemnation regarding the safety protocols and targeting practices of the Israeli military.
It should be clear that what has taken place is no longer a defense of Israel against a fascistic nationalist organization, but a systematic ethnic cleansing of Gaza that is now extending into the West Bank because the Ultras are the ones who proclaim that Israel should exist from Egypt to the borders of Iraq. And it is with eliminating its opponents, internally and externally, in mind that Likud and the Ultras launched the wars on Lebanon and Iran, continuing what I said years ago was already shaping up to be a regional war with global consequences.
However, the U.S. and European Left has broadly shown itself incapable of thinking through the issue in any clear-headed fashion.
On the one hand, there is an enormous turn towards antisemitism on the Left. Israel becomes the only unacceptable nation state. Israel is denied the right to exist. Anti-Zionism quickly rolls into antisemitism. Israel's actions as a typical capitalist crisis state become 'intolerable' and demand its dissolution, while no one calls for similar dissolutions of states or countries that would, have or are enacting similar policies. A "Jewish state", it turns out, of all of the failed post-colonial states that have enforced the integration into global capitalism by torture and violence and regression, is the one that is actually evil incarnate.
And Hamas? Hamas' actions are justified and supported, often unconditionally. That what Hamas did was a horrific act of mass murder intentionally targeting Israelis who were some of the most engaged in providing aid to Palestinians in Gaza was truly a cynical bit of Realpolitik. And that it has since jeopardized the lives of over 7 million Palestinians between Gaza, the West Bank, and Israel, is supposed to be washed away by the blood of those same Palestinians being murdered by Israel. All to undermine what looked to be an impending Israeli-Saudi rapprochement. Hamas' actions did not and never have had, anything to do with the freedom of the Palestinian people. They have always been a religio-fascist element, similar to the others that have arisen from the general crisis of the Middle East's relationship to global capital since the 1970's. They torture and murder homosexuals as aberrations against God's Law. They violently suppress feminists and women's rights in general. They use torture, imprisonment and sometimes murder against any political rivals and against union organizing.
But this is what anti-imperialist stupidity supports, a racist "allyship" that amounts to "Hey, it would be fascist here and we don't want it, but its good enough for "them", or should we say, its all "they" can afford." All while declaring a Jewish state the greatest evil in the world.
It is not surprising that this same Left largely expresses their Left Populist complaints about global capitalism through a variety of antisemitic tropes: the problem is the banks, finance capital, globalization, and these days, "the Epstein Class" which is a wonderfully crass and probably completely cluelessly enacted Judaicizing reference to the paedo (another antisemitic trope, by the way) capitalist class. Left Populism wallows in the tropes of antisemitism, whether out of shifting towards a red-brown social-fascist politics, or out of political ignorance, or out of a feeling of powerlessness that makes the Israel-Palestine crisis the most important litmus test of your radical bona fides. To the point that supporting the right side in that conflict was more important for many people than a woman's right to an abortion, the loss of which in the United States created almost no political clamor. Or, amazingly, more important than not electing an obvious fascist, Donald Trump.
That being said, there is a part of the Left, especially in Europe, and predominantly in Germany, for whom Israel can do nothing wrong because anti-antisemitism has become an ideology of and apologia for capitalist rationality as well. The crimes of the Holocaust and European responsibility must be played out as an infinite judgment of guilt and shame. For such members of the Left, to point to Israel as also a capitalist state and a moment of global capital is itself to make an antisemitic claim. To imagine that Israel might behave and be culpable of racist crimes against the Palestinians is antisemitic. It is ok to sacrifice the viscous "two-legged animals" on the alter of your guilt and shame, to go so far as ex-liberatrian communists like Elena Louise Lange did and proclaim on X/Twitter that
"Labour has voted against the national inquiry into child gang rapes [supposedly enacted by Muslims - me], because the entire Party itself consists of stinking paedophiles."
"The real reason Palestinians do not want their own state is they know they will fuck it up.
They will always be held to standards of Israel, to its prosperity and freedom, to the high standard of living its citizens enjoy.
Palestinians prefer to enjoy forever refugee and victim status.
This is enabled by the organisation that has for 75 years cemented the victim status of Palestinians: the criminal #UNRWA. Billions of dollars have been sunk into the victim narrative of Palestinians who could have had their own state and autonomy 5 times since 1947.
Palestinians are indeed the "most pathetic people on this planet" (Mosab Hassan Yousef)."
In the U.S., we are familiar with this move from Left to Right, just as we are familiar with the part of the Left that performs "white guilt" politics, while providing Left cover for all manner of grifters, in part because this performative white guilt costs them nothing because it is only black people who suffer from black grifters.
But in Europe, this has led to alignment with state suppression of any critical dialogue around the Israel-Palestine crisis and any support for the majority of Palestinians, even if it rejects any alignment with or apologies for Hamas or explicitly rejects antisemitism. It serves to further isolate Europeans from Middle Eastern migrants, which those states seek to do not because they give a shit about the Jews, but because any excuse for further isolating the many Muslim Middle Eastern and North African migrants is beneficial for their anti-immigrant policies.
And so it seems that clarity and a reasonably communist sensibility is hard to come by in the quagmire of global populism.
It might be good to recall that communists stand with the oppressed always and everywhere, against their oppressors, that we stand against capital, not just the states and capitalists who, miserable representations of capital that they are, (re)-enforce capital's domination everywhere today.
1. Antisemitism is still 'the socialism of fools', the false anti-capitalism that enables Naziism and Holocausts. Antisemitism remains a genocidal consciousness continuously produced out of the very treatment of money, finance and globalism as "the real problem with capitalism", something understood and expressed by as disparate a group of people as Jean-Paul Sartre, Leon Trotsky, Theodore Adorno, and Franz Fanon.
2. Defending the right of Israel to exist is a fundamental defense against antisemitism itself. The existence of Israel does not negate the continuing reproduction of antisemitism as a form of racist domination, especially in our era of burgeoning populisms, whether Left social democratic and/or anti-imperialist, or Right fascist, or that especially sinister and increasingly common red-brown social-fascist blending of the two.
3. Israel is and remains a capitalist state and will behave as a capitalist state. To refuse to criticize it as such in the name of anti-antisemitism is to turn the struggle against antisemitism itself into a justificatory ideology of a capitalist state.
4. What Likud and the Ultras have been and continue to do to the Palestinian masses has no justification and is indefensible, nor should the atrocities done to them every day be justified by an ideology of anti-antisemitism, which amounts to nothing more than an uncritical apologia for anything an increasingly racist populist political class controlling the state of Israel does.
5. The struggle of both the Palestinian and Israeli masses is against their common enemies who are sacrificing them on the alter of capital and of their own power, whether Likud or Hamas or any other manifestation of capital, and in doing so, each must figure out how to be done with "their own".
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