This morning, when I read the news about the encampments at Swedish universities, I felt happy. Not necessarily for the Palestinians, who are still suffering unspeakably, but for the students and for everyone else participating in the action. Because whenever people choose to act in accordance with their conscience against what they’re allowed to do, they’re exercising something magnificent: their freedom and their power of judgment. And seeing that makes me happy, because that’s an ability that proves that people can be more than cogwheels.
I also thought of Herbert Marcuse, who wrote in 1969, at the time of the Vietnam War: “We know […] that the situation is not a revolutionary one […]. But this same situation is so terrible, so suffocating and demeaning, that rebellion against it forces a biological, physiological reaction: one can bear it no longer, one is suffocating and one has to let some air in” (Marcuse 1999: 123)
I also think about the fact that it is not only Israel that should be ashamed. The stereotype of people who protest is that they are self-righteous. But when we criticize Israel, it is not only Israel that we criticize, but something much larger in which the entire Western world and the present world order are implicated. What the West has done through colonialism is both terribly similar to and a historical precondition for what Israel is doing to the Palestinians. We know that lord Palmerston laid out the outline of the policy according to which an increased Jewish population in Palestine should be encouraged because it would be in the interests of the British empire.* What we are seeing in Gaza is a result of this empire-building logic, which still exists today and which makes the United States and other Western powers refuse to give up their support for Israel.
There is also another way in which the West is complicit in the genocide. When we in the West today shy away from criticizing Israel, we do so in part to maintain our good conscience: we do not want to be associated with the anti-Semitism that led to the Holocaust. That motive is honourable. But today the Palestinians are paying the price for this good conscience, which has therefore become something both immoral and shameful. Criticizing Israel is not the same as anti-Semitism. To claim so risks becoming a carte blanche for the country to commit any atrocity whatsoever.
In Negative Dialectics, Theodor W. Adorno writes that Hitler has imposed a new “categorical imperative” on mankind, namely to prevent a repetition of Auschwitz (Adorno 1973: 365). I think it's important to point out that this imperative cannot be used to justify a carte blanche of the kind mentioned above. On the contrary, for it to have any meaning, it should force us all - regardless of whether we are Germans, Jews or any other nationality - to constantly scrutinize our actions so as to prevent or stop suffering. The imperative not to repeat presuupposes that a recurrence is possible, and can therefore not be based on the idea that Auschwitz is absolutely unique.** Indeed, the idea of such uniqueness would relegate the horror to the past and deflect criticism from our present society. Precisely in order to prevent a recurrence, it is essential to view it as part of the “permanent catastrophe” fuelled by the capitalist system that has become dominant in the modern world. Criticizing Israel is therefore neither a matter of anti-Semitism nor of self-righteously pointing the finger at another country, but part of a critique that aims at abolishing the system that makes genocide possible.
* See the historical sections of Andreas Malm's essay in Verso Blog. For a response on the conclusions Malm draws from his historical analysis, see Matan Kaminer.
** For a good clarification of this point, see Catlin (2023).
References
Adorno, Theodor W. (1973) Negative Dialectics (tr. by E. B. Ashton), London: Routledge & Kegal Paul.
Catlin, Jonathon (2023) “Antisemitism and racism ‘after Auschwitz’: Adorno on the ‘hellish unity’ of ‘permanent catastrophe’”, pp. 203-230, in Marcel Stoetzler (ed.) Critical Theory and the Critique of Antisemitism, London: Bloomsbury.
Kaminer, Matan (2024) "After the Flood: A response to Andreas Malm", Verso Blog, 10 May 2024; https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/news/on-palestinian-resistance-and-global-solidarity
Malm, Andreas (2024) “The Destruction of Palestine Is the Destruction of the Earth”, Verso blog, 8 April 2024; https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/news/the-destruction-of-palestine-is-the-destruction-of-the-earth.
Marcuse, Herbert (1999) Letter to Theodor W. Adorno 5 April 1969, in Theodor W. Adorno & Herbert Marcuse, “Correspondence on the German Student Movement”, New Left Review I/233 (January/February): 118-136.
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