I Support the Palestinian Struggle, but Oct. 7 Was Fucking Evil
It has to be said. It has to keep being said.
The situation in the Middle East is so horrible that I’m afraid to speak about it, because a fair and reasonable opinion risks offending both sides equally. It isn’t my issue, either; I’m not Jewish or Muslim, and I’ve never been to Israel, although I have a lot of friends of both faiths, including people with ties to the area. Anger, at political actors past and present, at a world system that fails to produce peace because it is run by people who benefit from war, and at a global cost-of-living and unemployment crisis that creates “useful idiots” (settlers, suicide bombers) for bad actors… is justified.
Therefore, I support the student protesters, insofar as I agree that Gazans have gotten an intolerably unfair deal. So have Israelis, who have been under rocket fire for years. So have Palestinians in the West Bank. So, to a less violent extent—at least for now—have all of us who are subjects of global corporate capitalism. I hope the protesters keep going in their education and learn that Israel, while it is flawed and its leaders have committed it to an unjustifiably excessive retaliation, is not as evil as one narrative of the conflict makes it out to be. Let me also make clear that Israel has as much “right to exist” as the US or France or Japan do. It houses and protects people who have nowhere else to go. It is surrounded by states whose uniquely toxic leaders regularly challenge its right to exist, and if it did not exist, millions of people—Jews and Christians and Muslims—would very likely die. “No Israel” is not—cannot be—on the menu. The same must be said of “No Palestinians”—they are as indigenous as Jewish Israelis and have every right to be there as well. Israel should be made better, for everyone, because the world becomes a very dangerous place if it isn’t there at all. I want prosperity and peace and justice for Palestinians, and I wish Israel had become a different kind of country, but if my wishing Israel had actually succeeded at becoming a light unto the nations, the protector of vulnerable people that its left-wing founders had envisioned—and my still wanting Israel to succeed—makes me a Zionist, I guess I’m a Zionist.
As I said, I support the protesters in their general rage at a world system that runs on nonconsent and violence. I’m a proud radical socialist, so I fully understand disappointment and even fury at the actions of a capitalist state. Still, the narrative that Israel is singularly oppressive because it is capitalist, in a world where all nations including those claiming otherwise are capitalist, or because it is “white”—never mind the existence of brown (Mizrahi) Jews—ignores the fact that… Hamas is worse. Hamas was blowing up buses and trying to murder friends of mine when today’s protesters were in cribs. Hamas was never moderate; its objectives have not changed, and it has always been evil. From the river to the sea, with Hamas in charge no one will be free.
I remember, as the October 7 invasion was unfolding, gleeful tweets from others, some of whom were leftists, about the defeat of a country they disliked, probably because (I’m giving them the benefit of the doubt, but maybe I shouldn’t) they had no sense of what would occur next. I’ve seen enough war footage, including from US crimes in Iraq and Russia’s inexcusable assault on Ukraine, to know what happens when a country is invaded. And this time, even I was shocked at how quickly the atrocities started, and how awful the affair turned out to be—with defenseless teenagers slaughtered at a music festival, with the taking of civilian hostages, and with close personal murder of a kind even most modern warzones don’t see. I also knew that Israel’s response—Hamas’s objective was to provoke extreme retaliation and create a state of total war, and it succeeded in this—would result in thousands of deaths and the retrenchment of some of the world’s oldest and stupidest hatreds.
And then on October 8, a group of Harvard student groups issued a joint statement saying they “hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence” in Palestine, including the October 7 massacres. First of all, that’s not fair or even true. You’re denying Palestinians agency if you make that argument. Second: even if you are, as I am, extremely critical of Israel’s government and the direction it has taken over the past two decades, this was in extraordinarily poor taste. It would be like going to a New York firefighter’s funeral in September 2001 and ranting about the evils of capitalism and imperialism—even though capitalism and imperialism are evil, there’s a time and a place for such a discussion, and that would not be it.
In fact, I would say that 10/7 was more horrible and more traumatizing than 9/11. Oct. 7 was up close and personal; Sept. 11 looked, until the second plane hit, like it could have been an accident. Also, in terms of motivations: The attack of Sept. 11, 2001 was deeply political and also happened to be evil. The attack of Oct. 7, 2023 was deeply evil and also happens to be political.
I hope the college protesters will realize that their rage at a world full of war and capitalism is justified, but that “Israel bad” is not a useful narrative. There are good people and bad people everywhere. The Israeli government, as lethally obnoxious as it has been due the country’s right-wing lurch in the past 20 years, is not an outlier and not even worse-than-average, as far as national governments go, in a region where tribal violence and atrocious leadership—I do not hold this to reflect on the character of individuals who live there, or on their religion—are disgustingly common. Genocidal wars happen all the time there for reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with a few million Jews, the vast majority of whom want to live in peace. In other words, the establishment of Israel is not what made the Middle East what it is today, not even close. Shall we excuse Israel’s government for sinking to the level around it? No. Did Israel turn into what it is now for no reason? Also no.
We should also address briefly why the ruling class, through college administrators, is taking such a hardline approach to the protests by students and professors. This response has nothing to do with antisemitism, though it exists as a minority contingent of the protest movement that the Left must address and repudiate. The draconian approach is certainly not being taken because our ruling class cares about Jews, who are a tiny (and, from their vantage point, expendable) minority, because they don’t, nor do they care about Arabs. The Italian and German ruling classes, circa 1930, were happy to tolerate what seemed like just a little bit of Jew-hate in the new crop of young passionate thugs, if it meant that labor and leftists would be crushed—in this, I doubt anything has changed. No, the vicious reaction of Authority to student protests has nothing to do with Israel or Palestine. Rather, the students’ reasonable demand that their tuition dollars no longer be used to fund a war they do not support threatens to become a much larger issue if a precedent is set that people are allowed to look into the actions of the virtue-signaling, neoliberal hedge funds that a number of the most prestigious universities have become. Again, rich people—the private jet rich, not your neurosurgeon uncle who’s been busting his ass since the age of six—don’t care about Jews and Arabs, because billionaires can always buy a ticket out of any situation they create. Rich people do, however, hate being told what to do with their money. They fucking hate it. The people in charge of these universities, who are mostly not among the ruling class but must work on their behalf, would much rather see some students and professors be arrested, beaten up, or even killed, than have a large number of people start looking into the world system in which they play a role.
Before I conclude, I want to address the bugbear that is “left-wing antisemitism” because, if there’s anything you can trust right-wingers and rich people to do, it is to use Jews—always “the Jews” when it’s them talking; the article can never be dropped—to divide working people against each other. I won’t say that it doesn’t exist. Are there left-wing antisemites? Sure. There are also—I don’t know any, but it’s a statistical certainty—leftists who beat their wives, leftists who drive drunk, and leftists who pick scabs off their bare feet on airplanes. Is any of that awfulness correlated to leftism? No. The horseshoe theory, at least on this topic, has been debunked. Antisemitism is an intolerable, inexcusable scourge, but it is found everywhere: there is a little bit more of it in the center than on the left, and there’s a hell of a lot more of it on the right.
Ignorance, scarcity, and intolerance remain our real enemies. Shalom.