How the Left Forgets the First Entire Nation of Refugees, Composing, 29/03/2015

Just over a week ago, I read an article by Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic. It sparked an idea that very well expresses the ethical idea that I’d like to end the Utopias project. Follow me through the example. 

When Israel was first formed as a state, supporting it
was a central pillar of the Western left. Needless to say,
quite a lot has changed since then.

Goldberg’s a typical militaristic sentimentalist writer of the Bush era, someone who can write an article in The New Yorker in March of 2002, sit back, and let that touching story of people suffering under Saddam Hussein push his own country just a little bit further into a new war.

A deranged intervention whose long term effect wasn’t a beacon of liberal democracy in the Middle East, but a war that stretches from Libya to Yemen to the Turkish/Syrian border. Bush’s war turned out to be such a great idea, especially in those little details of locking your most dangerous and insane prisoners in the same prison camp where you tortured them beyond sanity. Then left Caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in the desert with all his very dangerous friends. 

How can one friend ask me to be a humanist, and be optimistic about the transformation of humanity into something better, when the world is so clearly the product of idiots?

Goldberg wrote another article this week, the same string of sob story anecdotes which, when each episode links together, ends with the idea that no Jew has a place in Europe, and are all better off in America or better, Israel. 

What’s more, he blames both Muslims descended from the former colonies and ethnic continental Europeans. Each group is anti-Semitic in its own way, combining into a cultural stew that leaves the former colonized and former colonizer of Arabia and North Africa finding common political ground in the persecution of Jews. 

Michel Houellebecq’s hero of Soumission is real, and he’s the face of Europe’s anti-Semitism, that’s what Goldberg’s world suggests to me. But I’m pretty sure Houellebecq’s protagonist is meant to be an anti-hero, someone we’re supposed to hate. All Houellebecq’s protagonists are miserable assholes. He isn’t depicting Europe’s hero, but the essential European jackass of the modern era. 

This is Israeli life too, ordinary people like us, who
love to party.

Maybe the lesson is, never elect a jackass, and keep the rest of the jackasses off the streets.

Goldberg plays into one game of anti-Semitism. Painting leftism and social movements to free themselves from some economic or political oppression as haters of Jews will mobilize a liberal to back the military interventions of idiots. Those idiots can be pretty smart.

And the influence of Boycott, Divest, and Sanction plays right into the hands of those militaristic idiots. I’ve been thinking of this ever since my old doctoral university’s undergrad student union passed a non-binding resolution* to support BDS. And I hope my friends who supported this will see this post as, in part, my sincere attempt to explain why I could never support that organization. And why I will always do my best to help the social movements of the left.

* They didn’t have quorum after enough BDS opponents left the room, a last desperate gesture to take an edge off the vote’s legitimacy. 

BDS messaging goes beyond simply opposing the policies of the Israeli government in the Palestinian Territories and lobbying or beginning social initiatives for their peaceful resolution. Its framework principle is that Jews do not authentically belong in the territory that is now the state of Israel. Jews, as people.

Consider the feedback seen at, of all ridiculous places, a Waitrose grocery catalogue. Waitrose is the snooty, over-expensive British grocery store chain, which defines its customer base as the entirety of the old money upper classes. It’s basically like Longo’s is here in southern Ontario, only way more self-entitled. 

My thanks to Aboud Dandachi for linking this incident, the public furore over Waitrose including a section on the “Taste of Israel,” exploring the everyday traditional foods of the cultures there. 

Among the absurdly angry Mary Whitehouse types were dotty old British housewives saying that Israeli people have no national food of their own because they stole it from the Palestinians when they invaded. It’s as if the Sephardic Jewish communities, who have lived continuously in the territory now called Israel for thousands of years, never existed.

Salvador Allende, former President of
Chile, who died during a coup that saw
the fascist dictator Augusto Pinochet
take over his country and rule for over
two decades.

Such racism from people as innocuous as these dumpy British housewives plays straight to the militaristic right. This is the same modern militaristic right that idiotically meddles in the most volatile regions of the world trying to defend amorphous interests that have vaguely to do with the oil industry, but mostly from the sheer inertia of having spent 50 years destabilizing governments and starting wars out of an only partially justified paranoia of totalitarian socialism spreading across the world.**

** I think the problem of the CIA and their White House directors in the 20th century was that they couldn’t always tell a North Korea, East Germany, or Cuba from a Vietnam, Iran, or Chile. They didn’t know which leftist, anti-corporate political change would ally with the Soviet Union. Just like in 2003, they erred on the side of pre-emptive action.

Writers of the openly militaristic right, like another Goldberg named Jonah, have their own conception of the meaning of this talk from the left that the Jews have no authentic home, that they are chameleons and thieves without true culture. People of the left dedicated to human rights and justice swallow BDS propaganda that implies, though you may not see it at first, that there should be no Jews in Israel. 

The militaristic right wonders why any Jew can support the political left, since the modern political left is parroting all the classic signifiers of anti-Semitism. 

The worst part is that it sullies the cause of Palestinian liberation. I mean liberation from the constraints of Israeli military and police pressure over their lands, yes. But I also mean liberation from the warmongering leadership of Hamas and the corrupt leadership of the former Palestinian Liberation Organization. 

The proliferation of BDS rhetoric with its slippery anti-Semitism allows even friends of Israel to paint all critics of Israeli government policy as anti-Semitic. People like me, who genuinely hope for real peace among all the peoples of Israel and Palestine, are tarred with the same brush for criticizing Israeli state policy. The anti-Semitic messages of BDS dominate the global conversation of such criticism.

It prevents the most genuine voice of the left from making itself heard. It’s a voice that would perhaps say that Israel suffered a terrible wound in its creation. I hear it in the stories of Amos Oz. 

A group of noble peasants who had suffered under the cultural and economic suppression of the Turks and then British clashed with a wave of refugees from a terrible genocide fleeing the land where they were persecuted to literal mass-extermination.

Amos Oz, a voice of peace in literature.

These refugees had European ways of living, European appearance. A people who had been ground into generations of poverty, who had seen so many foreign forces arrive to dominate them, thought the same of these refugees. Both were escaping industrial colonialism, the Palestinians in the British (or Turk, or Persian) occupied territory, and the Jews running from the ovens.

Those disenfranchised people should have built Israel together, but they misunderstood each other. And that failure to communicate has led to horrifyingly violent hate all around. There is a left here, a progressive voice for peace. It’s the desperate voices of the left in Israel’s Labor party, or in the glorious idealism of Meretz. 

They see the only true way forward as the most difficult move: one by one, people whose cultures are defined by their mutually reinforcing hatred, must find the strength and courage to overcome that force. It is as simple to say, and feels as impossible to do, as living peacefully with your neighbours.

I call my next big political philosophy project Utopias. Well, this is mine. A society where each of us lives peacefully with, and does what we each can, to help our neighbour.

An Unheard Idealism: The Lie of a Colonial Israel, Jamming, 24/11/2014

When I was reading Mikhail Bakunin, the Russian anarchist revolutionary, earlier this year, what struck me especially in his later texts was a sense of sorrow, as if he knew, despite the continued existence of the organizations and networks he helped build, the moment for social change had passed. He was still alive, though not for much longer, and the conditions in which a radical change to society could happen were gone. The opportunity existed only for a moment, and then it disappeared.

As I watch the unfolding crisis in Israel, I feel as though a similar moment for genuine progress had long since passed. Over the last couple of years, I’ve grown more connected to the conflict in that country, first because of my girlfriend’s strong personal ties to Israel, and then because of my fear and disgust over the anti-Jewish racism in the West, when it became strangely acceptable to articulate criticism of the Israeli state’s actions as violence against ordinary Jewish people.

I was particularly horrified by the tendency among too many of the Western left who have begun to parrot rhetoric that begins in the anti-Jewish racism of Arab street propaganda, that Israel is a colonialist creation and has no right to exist.* But I find it completely weird to think of Israel as an articulation of colonialism because of the conditions of its formation. 

* In a broad philosophical sense, all states are founded on some form of violence toward their populations and have no real right to exist.

Before the modern left stumbles into parroting the racism
of Hamas, we should remember the values of the people
who originally settled Israel, the kibbutzim.

Thinking through this, I realized why Holocaust denial recurs so frequently in the discourse of prominent figures and ordinary people in the Middle East who advocate for Israel’s destruction, and who describe the Israeli state measures to control the Palestinian population as the only real Holocaust. Because if you accept the truth that the Holocaust was real, then you understand the Jewish settlers of Mandate Palestine and the population who founded the modern state of Israel as refugees.

There’s a story in the Amos Oz collection Between Friends that articulates the tragedy of the situation beautifully. Its focal character is an old professor who became a kibbutzim after surviving the Holocaust’s concentration and death camps. The story describes, through his memories of the kibbutz’s foundation, what their motives were. 

They were all anarchist and socialist radicals from eastern Europe, educated people whose goal was to work the land in Israel and build a peaceful society that had overcome all the ethnic and nationalistic enmities of the past. They had already lived through the most horrifying social phenomenon nationalism had ever produced, the industrialized death factories of the Holocaust. They bought the kibbutz’s land from Jordanian aristocrats and set up shop. 

The kibbutzim always made entreaties of friendship to the Arab villagers who lived nearby. They were all working people, farmers, teachers, craftspeople, who had suffered under oppressive powers that persecuted them because of their identity. The Arabs suffered under British, French, and Turkish colonialism; the Jews suffered under Russian and German racial oppression and violence. The establishment of the kibbutz movement was to have been the moment of radical change, when oppressed people would build a new society free from the terror of racism and colonialism under which they had suffered for centuries. 

Likewise, we should look to people like Amos Oz to
understand modern ideals of universal brotherhood.

At the same time as these kibbutzim, many of them Holocaust survivors, were reaching out to their Arab neighbours, there was another group of Jewish immigrants to the Palestine Mandate who had a more skeptical attitude. These were the Haganah and Irgun paramilitary groups who worked to establish the state of Israel by force. Oz’s story describes their dynamic with the kibbutzim as brotherly, but tense. 

The paramilitaries were skeptical that the Arabs in the region would ever accept Jewish people as their brothers. Decolonization in Arab cultures took a nationalistic character, revolving around the Arab identity. This was the grassroots activism of the pan-Arab movement that would bring the military government of Nasser to power in Egypt. People who define themselves according to ethnic nationalist characteristics will exclude those who do not fit the model, even if they could benefit materially from friendship.

What’s more, the military and monarchist leaders of the Arab peoples had a vested interest in preventing the growth of solidarity between poor Arabs and the secular socialist kibbutzim of Israel. If you define your anti-colonial movement through an ethnic national identity, then it won’t matter if your rulers are kings, army generals, or presidents-for-life, as long as they’re your kin.

In this atmosphere, every entreaty for peace and comradeship the kibbutzim made to their Arab neighbours was met with violent reprisals, as Arab people followed the rules of their nationalistic movement. This, even though a political alliance with kibbutzim would have liberated them from the kings and dictators who treated them as rabble or pawns.

Eventually, the kibbutzim gave up on their idealism in the face of ethnic nationalist violence, and their own ethnic nationalists had their way. So the one attempt to stop the feedback loop of violent uprisings and military reprisals was a failure. Despite the public force of those ideals influencing Israeli society ever since, the forces of nationalism have come to dominate the country’s politics.

One of my last conversations with my libertarian friends happened during the firestorm of anti-Jewish hatred that spread throughout Europe and Canada during Operation Protective Edge. He spoke seriously to me about how a core value of socialism was the hatred of Jews, their equation with capitalism and greed through their cultural association with the finance industry. He assured me that all leftists were anti-Semites who would like to rid the world of all Jewish people. 

Perpetuating Holocaust denial throughout the Arab
world is in the interests of oppressive military groups
like Hezbollah and Hamas.

I could not abide this because I knew that, despite many of my friends in left-wing political movements beginning to fall for the anti-Israeli rhetoric that was only a few short steps from the Holocaust denial that is a popular belief throughout the Arab world, it was a lie. And it was just as hateful a lie as Holocaust denial itself.

Oz’s story makes the point that Israel was built on a terrible tragedy, an attempt to build a home for all the oppressed whose idealism found no willing listeners, either among the nationalists of the Jewish community or their Arab neighbours. And despite all the violence of modern politics, that yearning for peace and brotherhood still exists in Israeli society, just as the yearning for freedom remains in every culture that’s been shaped by a rebellion against oppression.

This is why, to preserve the narrative of Israel and the Israeli people as inherently colonial oppressors of the Palestinian and wider Arab peoples, Holocaust denial has propagated through Arab society. Because if you admit the reality of the Holocaust, you are led inevitably to the fact that, despite all the reprehensible state violence and the pressures of population management that the Occupation encourages, you can’t vilify Israel in a pure sense. 

The reality of the Holocaust proves that the Jewish people are also historically oppressed, and that Israel was founded as an anti-colonial movement as well. Jews fleeing the Holocaust and poor Arabs stifling under colonial, military, and monarchist rule should have been brothers. The real seeds of peace lie in that regret.

Colonial Enterprises: How Legitimate Is a Resistance? Jamming, 18/11/2014

Thinking about the politics of post-colonialism, colonialism, and one’s complicity in or resistance to colonialism is an immensely tricky subject. Anything that you could write or say on the subject is bound to make someone angry. In that sense, it’s ideal for contemporary online media: blog publishing is driven by encouraging reader anger because rage is most likely to generate shares and clickthroughs. I didn’t make this system; I’m just learning about its details as part of my education in modern communications.*

* Mind you, this isn’t actually part of my program at Sheridan College; it’s part of the supplementary reading that I’m exploring while I work through my program.

So I thought I’d put together a short set of reflections on how I’ve engaged with the issue in my thinking. I’m not sure how these concepts will apply to the larger philosophical book projects that I’m slowly working on. The Ecophilosophy manuscript is a very separate topic, and while utopian elements are built into the ideologies of many anti-colonial resistance movements, their relationship to the vision of the mechanized man of Marinetti and Jünger’s imaginations at the centre of biopolitical totalitarianism is complicated. Mechanizing humanity is an inherently Western cultural idea, after all. 

But after going through Spinoza’s political writings (in reaction to my engagement with Robert Nozick over October and November), I realized that a core question of his work in the 1600s had become essential to understanding contemporary anti-colonial struggles, many of which had or plan to replace the current regime with one that’s even more oppressive. Why do people fight for their enslavement with the devotion they should apply to fighting for their freedom?

Negri: Imperialism vs Empire

While I now have the entire Empire/Multitude/Commonwealth series on my shelf, I haven’t really gone into Antonio Negri’s Empire since 2008. It was always on my list to revisit for the Utopias project, and I think I’ll start through that in December. 

One thing that stood out to me, and this was Negri’s major conceptual innovation in Empire, was that he distinguished the nature of the economic and cultural globalization of our current era from the empire-building of the past. States and control of territory through military occupation and governance were no longer the driving processes. Economic domination was occurring without direct state sponsorship. The result was a much more networked, centreless form of economic intensification. 

Negri clearly identified what had changed, what caused this radical change, and what its implications were. I learned from Negri that you could never denounce the West and its governments in this decentralized structure as directly or obviously as the sole cause of exploitation on Earth. In current times, you see the leaders of states that have been liberated from Western colonial control still carry out openly colonial practices in the Victorian mode. Yes, for the most part, the royals were the vassal governors and puppet rulers of Western colonial regimes. But to say that the ruling class of monarchist authoritarian states who buy African nature reserves to hunt for sport are more legitimate governors than a democracy founded on values of communitarian solidarity because 'colonialism' is a schizophrenic political blindness to a reality that makes nonsense of your knowledge categories.

The network had become much more complex, which made moral and political culpability a more difficult matter to settle, and maybe made it a non-issue if even nations who materially benefited from these arrangements had enough people who were otherwise disenfranchised. Blame would be the wrong question to ask.

One thing I've learned about Israeli society is that people
in North America don't often take seriously just how
different it really is from here.

The Vilification of Israel

When I read that late-period Karl Jaspers book a couple of months ago, it featured a quality that I find amazing to read today. Jaspers was a left-wing figure who lionized Israel as a bastion for democracy and a nation leading the world to the elimination of racism. Israel was founded by secular socialists, some of the most intelligent people of Europe in union with the Sephardic Jews who had lived in the territory for literally millennia. It was a democratic country building a strong tradition of communitarian anarchism through the kibbutz movement.

Today, however, Israel is identified largely on the global left with the terms ‘racist,’ ‘apartheid,’ ‘colonialist,’ and even ‘genocidal.’ I find far too many people for my comfort in the Western educated left thoughtlessly parroting the conspiracy theories and Holocaust denial regularly spouted by Saudi-sponsored Salafist clerics and radical militarist organizations. The government of Israel has certainly not been innocent in its hand-wringing disenfranchisement of the people in the Palestinian Territories after the Six Day War in 1967. But it is still a democracy where dissent is possible. 

In any other country in the Middle East, a socially conservative government with xenophobic tendencies, like the Netanyahu-Lieberman coalition, would have rounded up their opponents with the secret police, and would never have been seen again. That includes not only Assad, El-Sisi, and the House of Saud, but the monarchs of the Gulf sheikhdoms and the ever-so-Westernized royalty of Jordan. Instead, the Israeli government’s internal opponents fight them constantly in the Knesset, and the peace movement still continues its struggle against reactionary and xenophobic nationalists.

Violent Radical Islam as a Liberation Force

Nationalism is a danger in any state, because the mere existence of a state institution encourages a national identity to grow around it. That excludes people by its nature. The state is bureaucratic tribalism post facto rationally justified, after all. If we do it reasonably well, we get a democracy with a decent public health and welfare system that protects people’s rights.

So why does a movement that ostensibly fights against oppression choose a fundamentalist religious ideology, the most violently tribal extremism** humanly possible, as its banner of presumed liberation? It’s the ideology that its leaders and popular supporters seek to replace Western domination.

** Not only do you commit terrifying violence against a perceived oppressor, but that violence is justified by an absolutized transcendent authority. Not only do you act only on the material authority’s orders, but you act on your god’s orders too. That’s multiple dimensions of self-enslavement.

But it’s trading one form of enslavement for another. And because the topic is the subject of such a wide range of controversy and the resulting hyperbole, I don’t know if I could ever figure out a straight answer on the particular question that at the same time understands both the humanity of its practitioners while understanding how they can act so inhumanly.

Realpolitik Is the Price of Power – The Powerless Have No Excuse, Composing, 05/08/2014

This weekend, most of what I accomplished in terms of creative work was some more research for the Utopias book, as well as writing and editing for my play and film projects. Development on the film adapting one of my Alice stories is slowly progressing, and I’m now in completely control of writing the script. So that will be my major creative project over the next two months. 

What I want to talk about right now, though, is an idea that has come up in a few casual conversations, but has, as I reflected on it, amounted to an important element of my thoughts for the Utopias book. I’m familiar with the old rule (amazing that this has become old so relatively quickly) that it isn’t worth arguing with anyone over the internet. But over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been arguing with some people over the internet. Here’s how the shape of it went down.

As the Gaza bombardment ramped up, I noticed that my thread was increasingly filled with links to articles that were extremely critical of the Israeli government. Any war with the kinds of civilian casualties and terror tactics that the recent offensive in Gaza saw is worth condemning. Of course, any war, insofar as it is war, is worth condemning. But I also noticed that there was very little criticism of Hamas, and among my own circles at least, an acceptance that what they do is correct because it’s a form of resistance. 

I went into this in more detail a couple of weeks ago, but I can’t support Hamas because the positive part of its ideology is an oppressive form of Islamic fundamentalism that includes advocacy for the actual genocide of Jews in the Middle East. They paint themselves as liberators, but would liberate no one, instead replacing the economic oppression of the Israeli blockade of Gaza with the cultural oppression that we already see across the region.

An untold story that offended me even more than the bombardment itself was the racist violence against Jewish people, with incidents in Paris, Copenhagen, Calgary, and Mississauga. Conversations I’d had about these incidents resulted, in some cases, at racist epithets being thrown at me and my partner. Nonetheless, I’m proud of having brought at least a little more attention to these incidents. Because no matter how much justified outrage the day-to-day militarization and the specific war in Gaza today may provoke, it’s morally and ethically repugnant to blame all Jews for the reprehensible actions of the Israeli state. 

Yet we have to make some kind of decision on the matter. As political leaders, our politicians, governors, journalists, and prominent opinion makers have to take some kind of stand on issues of war and peace, even though no practical option can avoid violence. This is called realpolitik today, but it’s been a central feature of Western political philosophy since Niccolo Machiavelli.

Machiavelli is a complicated figure in philosophy and politics. His name has come to stand intuitively for amoral shenanigans and making political decisions without recourse to any moral or ethical compass or conscience. Of course, the real Machiavelli was much more complicated — his most famous work, The Prince, constantly overshadows his Discourses on Livy, which contains a fascinating theory on democratic discourse. 

It’s the same way with politics. Our ideals may be democratic, but our actions are stuck in the real world, where, in my case, I can yell and scream and protest about the need for peace and reconciliation at a world in which such a state is practically impossible. And our leaders, the people who actually make political decisions that direct the resources of states, are stuck with the burden of having to make impossible choices. When the only moral choice is to drop your weapons, mourn your dead, and rebuild society in friendship, being forced to do otherwise should haunt you. If it doesn’t then that leader doesn’t deserve to lead.

Arab dictators are the hardest motherfuckers alive.

This brings me to the other kind of unconscionable conversation I’ve had over the last week, about Syria. This war has killed nearly 200,000 people, and the actions of virtually all parties are horrific. Especially terrible were the actions of the Assad government, who responded to democracy protests with the brutal military and secret police crackdowns that drove Syria to the ruin it has become today. 

Yet I find voices on the left, which should be the moral conscience decrying the terror of war, not only forgiving Assad for his massacres, but endorsing him and making excuses. I have been told that the Assad regime supplied important social services during peacetime, and is only reacting to a popular movement that was spurred by American imperialism.

Yes, American imperialism, the concept, an adaptation of a dime store mind of dime store Noam Chomsky political philosophy, that the goal of United States foreign policy is to build an empire of allied states to enrich itself and its ruling class. It’s a straw concept that, unfortunately, is widely believed anyway. I’ve already written several times about the inanity of this idea, so I’ll just refer you to a couple of particular posts. 

What disturbs me about this mode of politics in the context of this post is its needless embrace of realpolitik. In the conversations I’ve had with folks who say that Bashar al-Assad is worth supporting, despite the terrible things he’s done, they justify this choice on the grounds that he opposes the United States. And I’ll at least take that as a technically valid reason, even though I disagree with it. If you think the United States government and military is dominated by corporate leaders who care nothing for the welfare of its people (which itself is a reasonable, and very persuasive argument), then fine.

But all of the people of this opinion that I’ve talked with lately are pretty much on the same level as me. They’re working stiffs trying to get by, who have a few nice Twitter connections and write things on the internet to express themselves and maybe persuade people of a few things. Yet they justify supporting Assad, a dictator who has killed hundreds of thousands and, even during peacetime, ran a government via a secret police, and systematically disenfranchised and marginalized entire groups of people (Sunni, Kurd, and Yazidi immediately come to mind), on grounds of realpolitik. 

To see a working class person, so divorced from the reins of power, embrace the Machiavellian attitude that the leaders of states and armies must, profoundly saddens me. Realpolitik is the decision making framework of a person who is forced by circumstances to make impossible decisions. It is the frame of mind of someone who lives in a war zone, whose life is threatened on a daily basis. When you face a world where everyone around you has guns and is a possible or actual threat, you have to consider allying yourself with monsters to live a little while longer.

But I live in Canada, a country where I do not face these kinds of decisions. I don’t lead the state, and have to choose allies among a world of competing powers and interests. I don’t live in Syria or Israel, where war and political violence have become omnipresent. My surroundings don’t force me to make impossible decisions and abandon my morals for the sake of a political allegiance.

So why would I?

One core dimension of my Utopias book will be able how a person, limited in her power, can confront these impossible decisions and keep her ideals intact, even act according to ideals of peace. It wasn't going to be part of the project when I first conceived of it, nor when I began the research. But when I look at the world in which I'm researching and writing this project, it has become unavoidable.

The Ideology Must Also Free You, Research Time, 24/07/2014

Some more thoughts on the nature of revolution. Reading through Bakunin’s essays is quite interesting precisely because he never actually developed a systematic philosophy, though his thoughts were shaped by a profound engagement with the philosophy of his time. I’m sure there are plenty of interesting and hideously boring texts comparing the Hegelian influence of both Marx and Bakunin. I’ll ask B about them one day, as his work is must more directly focussed on Hegel. 

George W Bush, unknown prophet of his own end.

One of the recurring ideas in revolutionary political philosophy and the real concerns of activists is that, after a revolutionary government is established, the new rulers will be little better than the previous one. I know what The Who’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again” is about; it’s really quite obvious. One of my favourite Bushisms was his, “Fool me once, shame on me; fool me twice . . . well, we won’t get fooled again.” And not just because The Who is totally fucking awesome. 

In that one moment, he embodied the entire future of failed radical political change that he tried to inculcate in Iraq through his government’s incompetent, abusive, and destructive invasion. The goal of Bush and his advisors from Project for a New American Century* was to turn Iraq into a democracy through military invasion, under their belief that merely the opportunity for a free vote would let the natural light of liberated reason shine upon the people of Iraq and they would elect enlightened leaders, Iraqi equivalents to Jefferson, Franklin, and John Jay. 

* This was a think tank formed in the 1990s that essentially incubated all the international political philosophies of the W government, particularly the notion that a military invasion could introduce democracy into a region, and that Iraq was the best candidate to begin this democratic domino effect. Of course, this domino effect was no more effective for democratic culture than communism. Prominent members of PNAC included Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld, and William Kristol.

Seriously. They actually believed this. They did the same in Israel when they brushed aside the concerns of Ehud Olmert and Mahmoud Abbas that Hamas would win the Palestinian national election of 2006 and their brand of radical Islamic fundamentalism would gain a streak of democratic legitimacy.

I think because too many in the West no longer confront
racism on a daily basis, we've lost our ability to accept its
existence and how pervasive such ideologies still are.

The secular left-wing democratic defenders of Hamas** that I have spoken with over the last few weeks since the Gaza offensive kicked into gear have defended that organization’s legitimacy on this ground. This was yet another unfortunate legacy of the Bush Administration and PNAC, in addition to creating the conditions for the incompetent Shi’a despotism of modern Iraq’s Nouri al-Maliki regime.

** I can’t believe I actually wrote that phrase and it refers to an existing set of people.

But there is a deeper reason why many folks on the secular left of Western democracies treat a political organization whose central constitutional goal is to replace the state of Israel with a Muslim fundamentalist state run according to traditional Shari’a principles on the model of the Muslim Brotherhood as an ally and comrade. No one who looks at the disenfranchisement of the ordinary people of the Palestinian Territories can ignore that there are great injustices in their political and social situation. 

There are many factors in this injustice: they include Israeli laws about who can legitimately hold real estate in the Territories, Fatah corruption, a culture that is increasingly tolerant of racist extremism on all sides and intolerant of the conciliatory gestures and friendships forged by idealists working toward an integrated community, the long cultural neglect of their former rulers in Jordan and Egypt who conceived the Territories’ peasantry as no more than political tools. I make no claim that this is a complete list.

Shortly before the current Gaza offensive, legendary Israeli
author Amos Oz spoke out to denounce the price tag wave
of violence: extremist Jews who vandalize and destroy the
property of Arabs, Christians, and Jews who do not support
an ethnically pure and fundamentalist Israel.

In such a situation of injustice, any form of resistance is legitimized because resistance to such an intractable political and social situation is legitimate. But while resistance itself is legitimate, there are many concrete forms of resistance that are ultimately counter-productive. The resistance strategy of Hamas and their Iranian military sponsors is ultimately nihilistic because the practical ideology of Hamas does not itself enable human freedom.

Say Hamas were to succeed in its revolution. While Article 31 of Hamas’ Charter gives lip service to religious pluralism, stating that Muslims, Jews, and Christians are hypothetically capable of living together in an Islamist state, the amount of anti-Jewish hatred Hamas has inculcated among Palestinian people to encourage militant action against Israel has poisoned any cultural possibility of genuine pluralism in a Hamas-governed Palestine that covers the entire modern state of Israel. 

Besides, in all of the surrounding Arab states, children’s television encourages the hatred and murder of Jews, and elementary education still teaches such genocidal slander as the blood libel and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion as basic facts about Jews and Judaism. Add to this, all the standard Islamic fundamentalist political norms of heavy restrictions on freedom of thought, hostility to secularism and science, and the institutionalization of the abuse and commodification of women.

Frantz Fanon, one of the original leaders of the anti-colonialist struggle in the Muslim world, is often cited as one of the thinkers who argued that violent revolution against colonial oppressors was a legitimate and appropriate expression of the people’s work for freedom and emancipation. That’s the textbook version of Fanon that everybody knows and cites. But there’s a lot more in Fanon’s ideas than this, and he provides the clearest rebuke to anyone, especially anyone who was raised in a democratic culture, who would use this concept to justify whatever acts of terror, violence, racism, and murder organizations like Hamas would commit in the name of freedom from oppressors.

Leader of Algeria's liberation, Frantz Fanon.

Fanon doesn’t stop with the legitimacy of resistance. The most unfortunate forms of political resistance are those that, while legitimate in the abstract sense, will only bring further material destruction on their people in eventual victory. If the political and social vision of a revolutionary army does not include the inculcation of a democratic culture, it will only result in further oppression. In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon wrote of two ways a revolutionary movement can fail in this sense. 1) They become so defined by the struggle against the enemy that, even when in power, their politics remain defined by the hunt for enemies, so they continue a war against their former masters and paranoiacally hunt down any form of dissent in their own culture as if mere refusal to obey were an existential threat. 2) The revolutionary ideology is merely a different kind of oppressive social and political structure. 

Revolutionaries are not simply warriors; they must also be nation builders. They themselves, their actions, and their philosophical thoughts provide the role models and templates for the citizens of their revolutionary new public. The true revolutionaries of the Middle East are the activists and artists who denounce racism in all its forms. Hamas are not true revolutionaries because they are just one more actor in the Middle East who seek to impose their vision on the world through violence. They are no exception to the region’s political order. 

The closest thing to an exception in the Middle East is the democratic culture of Israel, where despite the vehement denunciations that some members of the public fling at those who advocate an end to war, peace demonstrations and criticism of the government is accepted as a natural expression of social and political freedom. The utopian democratic movement of the kibbutzim was an essential element of the original Zionist movement, building alliances among oppressed peoples (Jews from around the world, the Sephardic communities that had lived in the region for thousands of years, in solidarity with local peasant populations who were similarly oppressed through feudalist hierarchy and monarchial despots; today, this population identifies as Palestinian) through communal agricultural production. In a society riven with hatred, fear, and violence, the most truly revolutionary act is to lay down arms and eat together as friends and neighbours in the face of armies.