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/409/ Palestine, Protest, Repression: The Wider Context (Patreon)

Published:
2024-05-07 07:01:01
Imported:
2026-06
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Content

On US campus protest, the brutalisation of Gaza, and whether this is an age of war.

Alex, George and Phil debate the matter of the day. We ask:

Is the police repression and associated censorship (the anti-semitism bill) a reflection of the fact the content of the protest unsettles the establishment? Why?

Why is the Left breaking with Biden and the Dems over this and not before?

How do these student protests compare to BLM? And how do they compare to those of the late 60s and Vietnam?

What should those in Western countries do in response to Israel’s war?

Is the Palestinian struggle dead?

What are the risks of regional war? And does Israel's assault on Gaza presage a new era of warfare?

Links:

The Triumph of American Idealism, Alex Hochuli, Damage

Like it or not, the politics of war is upon us, David Jamieson, Conter

Express Train to Nowhere: Class and the Crisis of the Modern Jewish Soul, Samuel Biagetti, American Affairs (pdf attached)

Is this How We Can STOP Genocide Joe?, Doug Lain interviews Dr. Elektra Kostopoulos & Dave Fox, Sublation Media

The Left Cannot Make Use of the Gaza War, Benjamin Studebaker, Sublation Media

Meet the new Left, who think Hamas are good and that Swastikas are woke, Ryan Zickgraf, Telegraph

Their Fight, Not Ours, Alex Gourevitch, The Northern Star

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Comments

i wonder how long of a name you can make on patreon wow they just let you keep typing letters huh i wonder if it will let me sav

Lots interesting in here. I'm not vibing with the cynicism on why the protesters arent doing stuff like demanding more democratic control over foreign policy. Something like that would surely have to come after momentum has been built. Will it be? Are we so in the wilderness it'll never get that far? Perhaps. That's legitimate fuel for your cynicism. But political programs don't drop out of the sky. Perhaps these protests are to that sort of democratic control over foreign policy what bread riots are to democratic control over the economy. An event, or set of events, has brought something into more acute view for many people, and action has been spurred in an unorganised form. The best hope would be that more developed demands and coherent politics would grow out of it. Not saying that looks likely here, but does popular politics ever go by any other route? The immediate aim is to stop the killing. A developed movement would then out of that demand start exploring how more systemic changes could be made, but the cart isn't going to come before the horse. Of course, maybe the horse we're more fundamentally missing is a richer web of civil society which any more issue specific movement would necessarily draw from, which is why it seems less likely this will result in anything more lasting and worthwhile. Sure we would all love to be surprised though... I've paused to write this with 50 mins left so apologies if you get on to say something like this, but one of you (maybe it was the Sultan of Cynicism, Phil) said they thought that for all that these protests have attempted to hurt or at least take aim at the Dem establishment, everyone will file in line once the threat of "fascism" is invoked again. But can that really go on forever? Might people, especially young people in this case, withdraw from politics even more? Surely (hopefully?) that sort of withdrawal has a limit before something really breaks with democratic politics; the Void can only become so big. Perhaps more disillusionment is needed before something better can happen. In that sense, perhaps we should welcome it. In the UK I wonder if it'll take prime minister Farage before anything decent manages to coalesce. Or maybe I'm too optimistic and it really will just be the past 10 years (minus the left populism) on repeat until Elon Musk plugs us into The Matrix.

Jacob Bucci

That protestors should demand congressional authorization of military force is a west wing assed take. The congress that fully supports the war or the congress that Biden has circumvented with thousands of tiny arms deals? Protestors have been very clear that their material demand is disclosure and divestment. There’s no pretense that they can end it, only that they can absolve themselves of funding it with their tuition dollars.

Gary

People who visited American BLM protests know they were attended by masses of working class people. Protests based on international issues are not, of course.

Richard R

Meh. Lackluster analysis. I know Phil has been searching for a way to ground sovereignty that isn't just the already-existing structures of nation states, but so far, he's failed. It's about race; the central political problem of Israel and Palestine; the protest movement against Israel. Nation states founded sovereignty on blood and/or soil. We haven't got a replacement yet that isn't just plain old, boring communism. And no one can make an academic career on that any more. BLM became international in the post-colonial world for the same reason: race remains a relevant political factor in people's life outcomes, even in post-colonies. The question about victimhood is very interesting and certainly important, but the categories through which we are expected to assign victim or perpetrator status continue to be the ones meted out by identitarianism, nationalism, and racism.

Andrew Mountford

The ethereal debate about victimhood misses the obvious reality that free speech on this issue is being curtailed because its in the interests of the UK/US/Israeli MIC and foreign policy establishment. Some 'vulgar' Marxism needed. Yes, the PMC leftist protestors don't have the capacity to take their protests beyond identitarianism but neither did those leading Brexit. The protests themselves, like Brexit, reveal that there is a significant gap between the public (who, at least in the UK, oppose the government's stance) and the MIC/establishment and this is good and helfpful despite the fact that there is no force able to push this forward and the protestors won't be willing to make the same points about Ukraine (Stop the War excepted.) Its also strange, particularly given you've had Norman Finkelstein on, that you don't acknowledge that attempts to conflate criticism of Israel with AS have been quite clear over the last 30 years in particular and reached a pretty intense levels in the Labour Party (over the IHRA). This policy serves the MIC as well as zionists who want to reinforce an identity with Israel as the 'mainstream' Judaism as well as other political ends re attacking the anti-imperialist left.

Door Maker

Nobody on the left is talking about the housing crisis or healthcare anymore. Instead they seem to put all of their energy into distant conflicts. Yes, the US plays a role in those conflicts but the emphasis on them to the exclusion of domestic concerns seems to indicate that the western left has given up on trying to reach local ordinary people. It also completely cedes the terrain of domestic politics and economics to the right (and possibly the center and “nonaligned” groups).

SeaWorldOrBust

Phil seems to be taking some heat both here and on twitter for his take that the significance of the Israel-Palestine conflict in the western popular conscience is related to the need to define victimhood as opposed to more concrete geopolitical concerns. It’s perhaps phrased a bit artlessly, but as someone who’s often critical of Phil’s takes, I actually think it’s one of the more interesting arguments I’ve seen on the topic. I can see how given Phil's longstanding (and IMO sometimes somewhat excessive) disdain for cultural/identity politics, it might come across as a lazy attempt to force that paradigm onto an issue that really ought to be taken more seriously. However I think his argument needs to be understood in the context of his wider writings on IR (which is, after all, his field) concerning the ways in which liberal interventionism is justified on the basis of victimhood. My impression of this argument has always been that it’s somewhat idealist to ascribe any kind of significant causal role to what strikes me as largely a post-hoc ideological construction. In this case, however, given that we’re talking about the conflict’s place in the collective conscience rather than the concrete causes of the conflict itself, a bit of idealism feels appropriate, especially given how handwavy the other explanations offered all seem — can anyone actually tell me what this “geopolitical” struggle is that Israel’s meant to be so vital too? It seems like there’s a pretty strong case to be made that America’s ties to Israel are actually more of a liability than an asset in strictly realpolitik terms. Of course that’s not to say that important actors in the American security state, popular media, and certain elements of civil society don’t still *perceive* it that way, with real and often dire consequences — but this is ultimately an instrumentalist argument, and while it may tell us part of the story, I think there’s a place for a more structural argument here. I don’t know that Phil’s emphasis on victimhood is necessarily the final word in this renewed structuralism vs instrumentalism debate, but the idea that this conflict plays an important role in the process by which liberal hegemony defines, and thus propagates itself is an interesting one that deserves to be taken seriously.

Davka Smolah Collective

I'm only halfway through, but as with your Gourevitch ep after Oct 7, I've already gotta thank you guys for the occasional content you put out about Israel/Palestine. Somehow other than the precise points I think you're bang-on about, I think you're completely off the mark, but even then you're completely off the mark because you admit that you don't really understand the Middle East, Israel, Palestine, or even Diaspora Jewry. This is a level of respect that, at least from the Zionist and Diaspora-Jewish sides I can speak for, we rarely receive: not having your countries' identity, culture, or politics projected onto us. Allow me to psychoanalyze the protestors a bit, based on the many interactions I've had with their type of activist over the years. There's a long, long tradition of fetishizing the Jews and projecting onto us your own society's fantasies, either positive or negative. When the fetish-objects turn out not to resemble the fantasy (again, for the positive as for the negative), the reaction often turns disciplinary, trying to force the fetish-object to conform to what the more educated, objective outsider knows *ought* to be true. The protestors have uncritically adopted an understanding of their targets/enemies constructed by Hamas, the PLO, and the PFLP to serve Palestinian ideological needs in a Palestinian social context, but then globalized and synthesized into a story that's actually about America. They have been told that Israel is the Amerikkka that they can still do something about, the "genocidal apartheid settler-state" that hasn't completed the process yet and for which full "decolonization" (the expulsion or subordination and minoritization of Israeli Jews) is still on the table. When Zionists and Israelis say "no it's not and in any case we're not going anywhere", these kinds of demonstrations - and these kinds of *wars* - are what happens. Compared to all that, the cause of the repression is much much simpler. These universities marketed themselves at the "front of the house" (to customers, that is, applicants and their families) as centers for (implicitly liberal-left or radical-liberal) activist politics. The students admitted under the premise of being activists are now barging into the "back of the house" and demanding that how the kitchen operates should fit the dining room's progressive vibe. This is utterly insubordinate and unallowable by any reasonable business corporation. Of course the universities are rank hypocrites, and of course the idea of paying for private tutors to get into a top private university to pay $70k/year to become a progressive activist was also always self-contradictory. The administrations and the students deserve each-other and I hope they all rot.

Bartleby

Interesting arguments all around, but I think Phil and George both miss the mark on their criticisms of the protests and the "millennial left" more generally. The demands made by the protesters, if you read them and take them seriously, all revolve around divestment. In a sense, it's an acknowledgement that americans have no lever to influence the government's never ending military aid for Israel, it's written in stone, an unalterable law of american politics (or so it has always seemed.) But there is a precedent for influencing a body like a university, in a sort of proxy battle. The issue for americans is that this war (and israel's foreign policy in general) is literally OUR war. We fund it with our taxes. It would not be possible without iron clad support from the US government. It's not that the students would prefer that Israel "not do nasty things," as Phil puts it. The issue is that we do not want to do nasty things ourselves, with our resources and in our name. If american foreign policy were as directly responsible for the various other disasters that Phil alludes to, there would be protests on those issues as well. But resorting to "what about this humanitarian crisis or that humanitarian crisis, why don't you care about that" only proves that they have no meaning for you, not for the protestors. You're using them as cudgels to score points, and incorrectly, too. As far as George's prediction, we shall see. But I think "vote for the lesser evil" may be way past it's expiration date for the left in america, for better or worse.

Richard R

There is a noticeable pattern in the discourse around the pod that seems to consistently fail to render opposing arguments meaningfully. I think back on sometime a few years ago, when "socializing childcare" meant children having legal protections against abuse and neglect, and the existence of daycare. We might well then say that the means of production have been effectively socialized, since workers have a modicum of rights, and there are limits on what kinds of trading are allowed. Similarly, "abolishing racism", already a difficult idea to render simply, becomes more or less completely illegible when it is reduced to outlawing racial discrimination. Imagine a counter-factual in which Black Panthers and the Nation of Islam were granted billions of dollars in favorable weapons sales and foreign aide starting in the 1960s--meditate on what is so absurd about such a counterfactual, and it should become fairly obvious rather quickly why racism remains a relevant factor in international relations. While victims commissioners and HR departments may be a poor replacement for disassembling and recommissioning organizations and private enterprises built on racism (why do Pfizer and BMW even still exist? why do corporations that dump toxic waste into native reservations still exist? why does Shell exist?), the problem remains a focus on individual persons. So it is with how "decolonization" is rendered by nationalists. Idiotic, antisemitic kids calling for the total liquidation of Jewish Israelis (again, where are these people? I was close to students involved with BDS for five years and didn't meet even one of these people, except one making the case rhetorically) are held up as examples of what is meant by decolonization. But in case you doubt that this is an incredibly negligible position, ask yourself why with all the coverage of the encampments you haven't seen a single image or video of even a single person making it. What is actually meant by decolonizing Israel, as with the US, and other postcolonies, is the disassembly and reconstruction of organizations and enterprises built specifically for the purpose of establishing racial hierarchies. In South Africa, this meant a new constitution. If someone is telling you that calls for a new constitution is a call for liquidation of whole populations, you may want to pause. It is undoubtedly the case that gobsmacked liberal so-called "anarchists" of my generation fall into ideas of abolition that are very nearly meaningless. Nevertheless, collapsing all of the wide range of ideas related to such abolitionism into the most childish, outspoken version will inevitably result into reflexive impotence, as it supports a false binary between, for example, killing every last Palestinian man, woman, and child on one hand, and deporting every Israeli person on the other. One of those options can actually be accomplished by the existing powers in the current situation. The other is a bogeyman made up in the mind of embattled, paranoid young people. Waffle and joke on which is which at your own peril. The problem with Israel isn't that it's made up of Israelis, it's that in its current form, it simply cannot be made up of anyone else.

Ghost Runner

I'm aligned with your view on the protests and Palestinians' situation. Yet, I think the left must stake out an anti-imperialist position even if, in the short-term, it is only a call for a ceasefire for the US to end aid and security. As minimalist as that is, it is superior to a realist position that relinquishes the upper hand to Israel.