“Jewish life belongs to Germany.” Few phrases are invoked more often in discussions of German-Jewish relations. It sounds like a promise, a reassurance, sometimes almost like a declaration of faith. Yet the more often it is said, the more pressing the question becomes of what it actually means. The very frequency with which this formula is invoked points to an unresolved tension. Its constant repetition appears to compensate for a deeper, largely unspoken unease. The assumption that this unease originates with Jews themselves and merely reflects the insecurity of Jewish life in Germany, however, falls short. In reality, it reveals a deeper discomfort within German society about its own past, of which Jews are inevitably perceived as a living reminder.

In political discourse, the focus often seems to be less on real Jews than on a particular “idea of Jews.” In this sense, Jews serve above all as the yardstick by which Germany measures its own claim to be a decent and democratic country despite its “difficult history.” At times, Germany’s commitment to “protecting Jewish life” appears as little more than a matter of duty, performed diligently, yet quietly experienced as a burden. This discrepancy becomes visible not only in political rituals but also in everyday life. For years, Jewish activists have pointed out that Jews in Germany are largely perceived in three roles: as mascots of intercultural dialogue, as objects of hostility in debates surrounding Israel, or as victims of the Holocaust. As a result, German-Jewish relations are marked by a persistent unease and deep-seated reservations.

Paradoxically, this insecurity often goes hand in hand with a striking degree of confidence, for example, when politicians quick to express indignation debate the legitimacy of Israeli retaliatory strikes or public intellectuals pronounce with great certainty on whether Auschwitz should be regarded as historically unique. The root of this imbalance lies less in a lack of information than in a resistance to experiences that do not fit the preconceived picture. Representative surveys repeatedly show how strong the desire for moral exoneration in Germany is and how limited the knowledge of one’s own family history often remains. Around 18 percent of Germans claim that their ancestors helped Jews during the Nazi era, for example by hiding them.

Historical research, however, paints a very different picture. Even generous estimates suggest that the share of those who actually assisted Jews in hiding amounted to only about 0.2 percent of the population. Yet this limited historical awareness is met not with humility but with a passive-aggressive sense of expectation. Against this backdrop, it is striking how confidently and loudly German society places demands on what is often described as “schützenswertes jüdisches Leben” (“Jewish life worthy of protection”). The sheer number of requests directed at Jewish communities, organizations, and their representatives speaks volumes: “Jewish life” should not be too Zionist, it should remain suitable for moral admonition and remembrance, and it should stay compatible with interreligious dialogue.

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For many Jews in Germany, however, Israel is not a distant political issue but an essential element of collective security and identity. This is particularly true for Jews with Eastern European family backgrounds, who make up the large majority of the community. Their families were shaped by experiences of Soviet antisemitism or earlier waves of persecution in Eastern Europe. For them, anti-Israel rhetoric rarely appears as a purely abstract political disagreement. It often resonates with experiences of exclusion and older patterns of antisemitism, and therefore carries a particular historical weight that many outside these communities underestimate.

The Expectation of Moral Superiority

This arrangement works as long as the “Jew worthy of protection” fits the expected mold and there is agreement on what his legitimate needs are. It starts to unravel, however, as soon as Jews articulate their everyday fears and concerns about security, about radicalized Muslims or postcolonial agitators on university campuses. Suddenly Jews are seen as unreliable, politically instrumentalized, or as having taken a political wrong turn. In this constellation, Jews are not perceived as subjects with their own lived experiences, but as extras in a scripted moral drama. Jews may speak as long as they reaffirm what is already believed to be right. Once they deviate from that script, they lose their role.

Interestingly, voices that fit prevailing expectations often receive disproportionate attention in German public discourse. In several prominent cases, these have been left-leaning American or Israeli Jews whose hostility toward Israel resonates strongly with German audiences. While publishing in major newspapers and appearing on talk shows, they often lament the supposed suppression of dissenting voices. In practice, however, such outside commentators are readily welcomed in the German debate, as their interventions make it easier to portray more conservative and security-oriented positions within local Jewish communities as unjustified attempts to “exploit German guilt.”

This imbalance becomes most apparent where outrage is selective, as sympathy for victims of antisemitism at times depends less on the person attacked than on the identity of the perpetrator. When Jews are attacked by a white neo-Nazi, the outrage is immediate and widespread. The image fits, the lines are clear, and it is easy to take a moral stance. The moral calculus changes, however, when antisemitism surfaces within progressive ranks or among those perceived primarily as victims of racism. This is where the relativization begins: everything is placed “in context,” followed by the familiar admonitions not to generalize, not to instrumentalize, and not to “play into the hands of racists.” Concern then shifts away from the Jews who have been attacked toward the political hygiene of one’s own worldview.

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German essayist Eike Geisel once captured this expectation with biting irony. Germans, he argued, have come to view Auschwitz as a kind of “reformatory” for Jews.1 The victims themselves are expected, in retrospect, to demonstrate that something morally meaningful could still be salvaged from the senseless machinery of extermination. Not despite Auschwitz, but precisely because of it, Jews are expected to behave in a particular way. They are expected to be better people and to have internalized a “never again” that is increasingly understood today as an obligation to exercise restraint even in the face of antisemitic terror, much of it perpetrated by radicalized Muslims. Confronting such antisemitism too forcefully, however, would challenge the multicultural self-image of contemporary Germany as an open and tolerant society.

In this context, it is not difficult to imagine the “bad Jew”: the one who refuses the role assigned to him. He is not conciliatory, nor willing to reinterpret the violence directed against him and his community as the expression of deeper social forces. Instead, he insists on self-defense, on Jewish solidarity, and on the right to express anger and demand justice for the wrongs inflicted upon him. Above all, he disrupts the comforting belief that something morally redeeming emerged from the catastrophe. The “bad Jew” refuses the pedagogical expectation. And that is precisely the provocation. Once Jews can no longer serve as a moral lesson, the entire arrangement begins to falter.

The urge for exoneration and the relentless search for “Jewish guilt” are not marginal phenomena but a central mechanism for deflecting guilt in postwar Germany. The supposed crimes of others provide a convenient escape from confronting the crimes of one’s own ancestors. Under these circumstances, it is hardly surprising that slogans such as “Free Palestine from German guilt” found particular resonance and that antisemitic mobilization began even before Israel could respond to the October 7 massacre to protect its population from further attacks that had already been announced.

The expectation of moral superiority turns into aggression when it is disappointed. Jews who refuse to chasten themselves or to join the demanded criticism of Israel will be disciplined accordingly. One interlocutor succinctly described this impossible situation: “I wish more people in this country would treat us like ordinary people, and not as symbols or projection screens for their own conflicts.”

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Will There Still Be Jews in Europe in Twenty Years?

After October 7, it became clear how deeply these reaction patterns are entrenched in German society and how fragile the supposed German-Jewish normalcy truly is. Many Jews had expected that the brutality of the massacre and its openly genocidal intent would preclude any relativization; that the sheer scale of the violence would persuade even those who had long resisted all arguments. Instead, hatred of Jews exploded, with deadly consequences around the world.

Images of mutilated bodies and of those abducted to Gaza did not primarily evoke sympathy but intensified existing hostilities. Antisemitism persisted not despite the suffering but, disturbingly, because of it. In conversations, the same image was drawn again and again: sharks that smell blood and begin to circle their prey. This image captures the unsettling realization that Jews, once they show vulnerability, will not be protected. They become targets. When suffering becomes visible, it does not restrain hostility but instead fuels it.

Many also described a climate in which their grief was not recognized as such but immediately relativized or weighed against the number of victims in Gaza. Against this backdrop, it is hardly surprising that many Jews are considering leaving Germany altogether. The future of Jewish life in Western Europe is no longer an abstract question. In neighboring France, around 50,000 Jews have emigrated over the past decade, many of them moving to Israel, according to figures from the Jewish Agency. Germany is harder to quantify statistically, but anecdotal evidence suggests a comparable trend. Many younger Jews are considering leaving, often for Israel or the United States. The motivations may vary—security concerns, political frustration, or simply the search for a more stable future—but the underlying question remains whether Jewish life can continue to flourish in societies where hostility toward Israel and Jews is increasingly normalized.

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Several European governments have recently moved toward recognizing a Palestinian state, a step often driven less by diplomatic strategy than by domestic political calculations. For many politicians, the issue is increasingly shaped by electoral arithmetic, with a combination of antisemitic sentiment among segments of the political left and among parts of Muslim communities becoming an influential factor in public debate. Governments worry not only about votes but also about unrest in the streets. In such a climate, affirming gestures toward the “Palestinian cause” can appear politically advantageous, even when they run counter to the security of local Jewish communities. In Germany, such a policy still seems unlikely. Among older generations there remains a sense of historical responsibility or, if not that, at least a reluctance to damage Germany’s carefully cultivated postwar image. Yet demographic change and the sharp rise in antisemitic incidents may well shake this fragile equilibrium.

At the same time, Germany is increasingly shaped by political and intellectual currents that transcend national borders. Paradoxically, the country’s deep integration into transnational institutions and its embrace of an increasingly “internationalized” political culture have also created channels through which forms of antisemitism already visible in international forums such as the United Nations can gain influence. This is no longer the old, traditional hatred of Jews, but rather its postmodern and politically respectable variant. Increasingly, younger Germans who study abroad and move within international academic, corporate, and policy networks adopt these frameworks as well.

In Germany, uncertainty is growing, and an increasing number of Jewish parents are wondering whether they can still raise their children in Germany and send them to regular schools. In some of these schools, out of consideration for the sensitivities of Muslim students, the Holocaust is addressed only cautiously or avoided altogether. Many Jews are increasingly retreating into Jewish circles, not out of a desire for isolation, but out of necessity. The reemergence of separate professional associations for Jewish journalists, academics, and lawyers is itself a sign of how much public space has narrowed for Jews.

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Jews are often described as the canary in the coal mine, though many are unaware of what the metaphor actually implies. When Jews begin leaving a society because of rising antisemitism, it signals more than the dangers of “brain drain”—the loss of figures like Freud, Einstein, Zweig, or other “lost talents” often invoked in German popular culture in connection with flight and exile. Rather, it points to a central insight that is still insufficiently acknowledged: antisemitism poses a threat to freedom, democracy, and the Western way of life as a whole.

Precisely for this reason the broader society should be far more concerned, not out of well-meaning sympathy, but out of sober self-interest. For where Jews are attacked, the very order that places law above power and allows dissent will sooner or later begin to break down. If hatred of the liberal West, with Jews often cast as its agents, continues to grow without resistance, the embattled Jews of Europe will settle elsewhere. Jewish history offers many such examples. In the long run, this has usually harmed the societies that rid themselves of Jews or watched it happen in silence.

Ultimately, every Jew is evidence that somewhere in their family line someone once made a conscious decision to remain Jewish despite violence, exclusion, and persecution, despite the tempting option of assimilation. Sometimes this meant abandoning a place of residence after centuries in order to pursue a Jewish future elsewhere. The Jewish path was rarely the easier one, yet it was chosen again and again. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks described Judaism not in its narrow religious sense as a system of beliefs, but as a shared story unfolding across time. This civilization has survived, while the vases and jewelry of the Romans and the mummies of ancient Egypt can now only be admired in museums.

This article is an extended version of a piece originally published in the German journal Zeitzeichen. The author gratefully acknowledges Eric Fraunholz for his assistance with translating this essay.

Topics: Israel Initiative • Reflections & Dialogues

Alexandra Farkas Bandl is pursuing her doctorate in Leipzig, with a focus on East-Central Europe, Jewish history, and the political cultures of state socialism in Hungary. She also leads a Jewish and Zionist organization for young adults.

Modern nationalist movements are torn between identity as a subjective narrative and identity as an institutional construction. This tension is perhaps most visible when we look at the Palestinian nationalist movement through the lens of poststructuralist theory, and specifically the works of Judith Butler. There is an instructive parallel between the tenets of postmodern gender theory and a specific form of nationalism that has fetishized the symbolic performance of nationalism instead of seeing it consummated in the social construction of the state. By prioritizing symbolic accidents over functional essence, Palestinian nationalism has created a condition of teleological suspension that indefinitely defers the consummation of Palestinian statehood, while enabling apocalyptic gestures such as the would-be genocidal invasion Hamas launched on October 7, 2023.

Judith Butler’s concept of performativity offers the clearest lens for this dysfunction. The term “performative” is often dismissed with the added adverb “merely,” as if “performative” were merely an academic euphemism for “fake” or “insincere.” That forgets the folk wisdom of “fake it ’til you make it.” Performativity, for Butler, refers to a repetitive practice that produces the effect of an identity. Butler draws from the theory of speech acts to argue that realities are often constructed through the continuous repetition of symbols, rituals, and language. In her seminal books, Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter, Butler argues that we do not “have” a gender; rather, we “do” gender, and through that doing, we create the illusion that there is an internal, preexisting essence behind the performance.

When this logic is applied to the political sphere, specifically to the Palestinian national movement, a structural similarity to gender theory emerges. The Palestinian national movement has not been a precursor to a Palestinian state, but a performance affirmed through symbols (the flag, the key), historical narratives, violent resistance, and international advocacy. The nation exists within the repetitive acts of resistance and declaration rather than in the concrete structures of governing, such as taxation, law enforcement, and infrastructure maintenance.

Palestinian performative nationalism has become a permanent revolutionary praxis rather than a pre-state project. The 1993 dictum of today’s Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas, that “the mind of the revolution is very different from the mind of the state” is a trenchant comment on the movement from within, but it has remained a merely verbal critique. For previous national movements up to Zionism, performative nationalism was part of the actual social construction of a nation-state. Performative nationalism was in part the glorification of constructing water and sewage systems, managing economies, and securing borders. With Palestinian nationalism, as with transgender performance, the work ends with the production of the identity.

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In the context of nationalism, performative movements treat the trappings of nationhood—flags, anthems, resistance aesthetics, even, as we shall see, performative violence and international recognition—as if they were the essence of a nation-state. While these features are associated with nations, they do not constitute the whole of a state’s functional reality, which includes the enforcement of law, the collection of taxes, and the capacity for maintaining and protecting the population and defending the borders.

This fetishism mimics some outward performances of a state without constructing the machinery. In gender theory, this gap is ontological: because changing biological sex is impossible, the performance must be the fetishistic substitute for the reality. In the Palestinian case too, the anticipatory performance substitutes for its intrinsic goal. For the Palestinian movement, the performance does not act as a substitute for an impossible reality, but as a diversion from a possible one.

The current state of Palestinian nationalism is the result of a historical lineage of “mimetic nationalism.” In the early twentieth century, nationalist movements were iterative: the Zionists studied and copied the Irish struggle, and the Palestinians subsequently modeled their movement on the Zionists. The Irish national movement, however, eventually pivoted to the mundane work of statecraft, establishing the Free State, an army, a police force, and all the other apparatus of modern statehood. Éamon de Valera, who preferred irredentist resistance to the obligations of statehood, was crushed by the Treaty supporters of the Irish Free State in the Irish Civil War.

Zionists explicitly studied Irish guerrilla tactics but were obsessed with constructing bureaucracy and its material instantiations. They focused on building power plants, ports, and healthcare systems—effectively constructing a “state within a state” under the British Mandate. The performances of nationalism—the anthems, the flags, the diplomatic representations—were always understood as costuming for the material and bodily construction that is state-building.

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In contrast, the Palestinian movement has fetishized external and superficial aspects of the performance of statehood. Gender theory says that the clothes make the woman, and, correspondingly, Palestinian nationalism performs as if some of the trappings of nationalism could make the state. The Palestinian national movement mimics the Jews’ armed struggle against the British and the Arabs from 1945 to 1948 rather than the proto-state Zionism that made that moment of resistance a stage of state-building.

Building a functioning Palestinian economy and fiscal system independent of Israel is omitted in part because the “refugee” identity—the core of the performance—requires a state of dependence on international aid, such as UNRWA. To become self-sufficient would be to stop performing the role of the victim. Consequently, the state does not arrive because neither Palestinians nor foreign powers engage in the essential work of building it.

A fundamental misunderstanding of political ontology contributes to the failure of state-building in the Palestinian context. As Eugen Weber argues in Peasants into Frenchmen, state-building is an act of colonialism, in some places largely externally imposed, in others like post‑1815 France internally driven. Weber demonstrates that national unity in France was not natural but was manufactured by a colonizing center in Paris that aggressively erased local cultures, imposed a standardized language, and utilized compulsory schooling and military conscription to turn disparate groups into a single nation.

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Zionism succeeded because it both pursued this colonial praxis and collaborated in the British colonization of Palestine. The pre-state Jewish community (the Yishuv) imposed Hebrew over Yiddish, created a militia and an offensive strike force, and established centralized institutions. Like the French, the Italians, and the Chinese, the Jews colonized themselves to create their modern state. Like other peoples within the modern British Empire, they also allowed the British to colonize them as long as that colonization served the mandated end of building a Jewish national home.

The Palestinian movement, identifying purely as “postcolonial,” is structurally incapable of this process. If national identity is constructed entirely around resisting power and resisting imposition, the leadership cannot build a state, because, as Eugen Weber explained, a modern state is always and everywhere an imposition. To master the machinery of sovereignty, the Palestinian leadership (whether Fatah or Hamas) would have to superadd policing their own people and extracting revenue from them to the performance of resistance.

Palestinians and their foreign supporters blame their failures of modernization on “the occupation.” There are certainly cases where imperial or colonial powers have prevented the acquisition of state capacity by those despotically ruled. The United States has always carefully managed its Native American “subject nations” to prevent them from empowering themselves by conducting their own relations with European powers, or by accepting immigrants and assimilating them.

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Palestine under British and Jewish rule is, however, not one of those cases. By refusing the status of subjects under the British Mandate or under Israeli occupation, Palestinians failed to acquire the institutional levers necessary to become citizens of their own state. The refusal to participate in the colonial work of state-building is illustrated by the Palestinian response to the British Mandate. In the 1920s, specifically with the 1922 Legislative Council proposal, the British offered a representative body to the Arab majority. The Arabs rejected it because participation would have implied recognition of the Balfour Declaration and acceptance of the legitimacy of the terms of the Mandate.

Under the Mandate the Palestinians even refused superficial performative aspects of nationalism. In 1926, Lord Plumer, the second High Commissioner, was invited by the Jews to a major athletic competition. At a ceremony in Tel Aviv, Plumer stood for the Zionist anthem, Hatikvah, prompting outrage from Arab delegations who accused him of bias. Plumer responded by asking the delegation if they had a national anthem for him to stand for. When they admitted they did not, he advised them to “get one as soon as possible.” It took the Palestinian movement over 60 years to heed this advice.

In the nearly eight decades since the British left, the Palestinians have mastered some of the performative aspects, but to a substantial degree neglected or refused the work of state construction. Beginning with the First Intifada they ceased to collaborate strategically with Israel, thus preventing the Jews from building the state apparatus for them eventually to take over.

Contrary to the postcolonial narrative that views all imperial presence as purely destructive, the history of successful state-building often involves a phase of indirect rule, where institutions are built for an emerging nation under the security umbrella of a hegemonic power. The Zionist movement understood this pragmatically. They utilized the British Mandate as a “cocoon,” allowing the British to handle the heavy lifting of external defense and external security. This freed the Yishuv to focus their energy entirely on the mundane internal construction of a state: collecting taxes, building power plants, and managing healthcare.

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The tragedy of the Palestinian national movement is the repeated refusal to utilize the space of indirect rule for governance. The Oslo Accords were, structurally, an offer of indirect rule—an opportunity for the PLO to build a civil state while Israel bore the cost of external defense. However, Yasser Arafat, and later Hamas, rejected the logic of governance. For Arafat, the autonomy granted by Oslo was not a platform for building a state but a sanctuary for preparing violence. By prioritizing the capacity to kill Jews over the capacity to govern Palestinians, the movement remained trapped in a performative loop: forever staging the revolution, never constructing the state.

When the British left in 1948, the Zionists did not need to build a state from nothing; they merely needed to rename the one they had partly built and partly co-opted. Israel has repeatedly allowed Palestinians to conduct their own diplomacy and raise resources from European and Arab countries. The Palestinians have chosen to invest those resources in infiltration tunnels, improvised and purchased weapons, and payment to families of martyrs, rather than more permanent forms of state construction.

The ultimate trap of performative nationalism is found in acts of spectacular violence that attempt to summon a new reality through blood sacrifice. The Hamas attack on October 7, 2023, can be analyzed as “apocalyptic performativity”—an attempt to force the embodied world to align with a performative fantasy through sheer magnitude of rape and killing.

This substitution of spectacular violence for institution-building echoes other historical cases, most chillingly the Hutu Power movement in Rwanda up to the genocide of 1994. Both the Rwandan genocide and October 7th involve a group trying to solve a deficit of state-building by wholesale murder. Like the Palestinians relying upon UNRWA instead of building a tax system and a parastate to provide actual public services, the Hutu-dominated government of Rwanda outsourced public services to foreign aid agencies and NGOs. Lacking the capacity to defeat the RPF rebels on the battlefield, the Hutu government turned to the systematic slaughter of defenseless civilians to perform the purification of the nation. In both Gaza and Rwanda, performative violence did not achieve by itself what can only be done through socially constructed state power (if, sometimes, genocidal state power); rather, this violence invited its destruction by a more institutionalized military force of a state or, in the case of the RPF, of a state in waiting. Genocide for both Hamas and the militant Hutus was not a political-military strategy but a performative substitute for one. For that fetishistic substitution, Butler’s poststructuralist gender theory serves as apologist and cheerleader.

The political-philosophical problem can be summarized viscerally as “all wedding, no consummation.” The “wedding” is the ceremony of statehood: the flags, embassies, UN resolutions, and cultural cachet—an anticipatory display. Consummation would require producing state institutions on the ground. This would require enforcing law and order and building an economy and a bureaucracy that would enable the Palestinian nation-state to operate entirely or principally from Palestinian ways and means.

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The Palestinian movement acts as if the ceremony is the marriage. They act as if the ceremony is loud enough, and if enough important guests attend, then a Palestinian state will spontaneously appear without the need for all the foundations of state construction. Herzl’s novel Altneuland was the performance of a vision and a promise, yes, but the modern Zionist movement Herzl created treated his novel as an inspiration for political and economic instantiation.

The Palestinian national movement has won over the audience (international opinion) and perfected the symbols of nationhood, yet it lacks the constructed reality of a state because the Palestinian national movement has refused to undertake the colonial labor of state-building and has successfully resisted or refused to allow it to be done sufficiently for the Palestinians by others, such as the British or the Israelis. The tragedy is that the partial performance has succeeded too well; the Palestinian national movement is waiting for the state to appear without internal or external colonization because they have perfected some of the performative aspects.

The Palestinian national movement has refused much of the praxis of state-building, but unlike the Kurds or the Zapatistas it is not content with becoming a nonstate autonomous community. Until the movement transitions from the ceremonies to the infrastructure of sovereignty, it remains a performance of nationalism that avoids the state-building that is supposed to consummate it.

Poststructuralist theorists view the instantiation of gender in the biological family or the instantiation of embodied power in the nation-state as oppressive structures that should be deconstructed. As Corinne Blackmer has pointed out, this leads the organized trans community to reject the successfully embodied performance that is the Jewish state. Conversely, the Palestinian movement they admire seems trapped in a fetishistic display where the performance of resistance becomes the highest possible achievement.

Topics: Israel Initiative

Michael S. Kochin is Associate Professor in the School of Political Science, Government, and International Relations at Tel Aviv University, and Visiting Scholar in the School of Philosophy at The Catholic University of America and the Van Andel Graduate School of Government at Hillsdale College in Washington, DC.

Preliminary research on the relationship between antisemitism and the campus encampment protests of spring 2024 found that anti-Israel beliefs were more prevalent among female students than male students. Given that Israeli women were sexually violated, mutilated, and murdered on camera by Hamas terrorists on October 7, these findings are notable, and might be surprising, were they not reflective of similar dynamics off-campus. For example, it took UN Women two months to issue, under pressure, a lukewarm acknowledgement of the brutal sexual violence against Israeli women, which was more than the National Women’s Studies Association did when they vaguely noted the “gendered and sexualized harms” that occur during war without even mentioning October 7—but condemned Israel’s “systemic violent campaigns” against Palestinians.

In their May 2025 article on Telos Insights, Russell A. Berman and Rebecca A. Kobrin posited eight potential reasons for the disproportionate representation of women within the encampments. Some possible explanations centered around statistical representation, such as that more women than men lean left politically or that women are likelier to be involved in humanities disciplines wherein support for protests was fostered. Others considered women’s allegiance with Palestinians they perceived to be victims in light of women’s experiences of gender oppression, a “preexisting grievance mentality,” or the media emphasis on Gazan women and children as casualties of war. Two theories dipped into more psychosocial waters, with Berman and Kobrin suggesting a possible “appeal of patriarchy” and a related “anti-intellectual pleasure” in romanticizing a violent male paradigm, represented by the Hamas rapist, that differs from the “degraded masculinity” of collegiate young men of the twenty-first century.

My sense is that all of these suppositions help to explain why so many women have aligned with a violent misogynistic movement like Hamas, but I’ll offer one more possibility, which relates not directly to gender but to racial identity development. Some research on campus attitudes related to the Israel–Hamas war found that white scholars were more likely than scholars of color to oppose Israel’s military response. Specifically, then, my supposition relates to the overrepresentation of white women in anti-Israel activism since October 7. To unpack this supposition, I’ll briefly examine the role of antiracism in the context of anti-Israel activism, followed by an overview of racial identity development theories, before I consider how this helps us understand the actions and attitudes of white women. Finally, I’ll tie these three elements together to explain how white women’s support of Hamas as a “resistance” movement reifies both racial and gender privilege.

Racial Framings of the Israeli–Palestinian Conflict

Contemporary narratives about the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, reinforced by the strategic infusion of anti-Israel and antisemitic propaganda into academic disciplines within the humanities, frequently frame Zionism as a colonial racism that must be eradicated and, subsequently, view Hamas terror as a justifiable form of resistance to ensure Palestinian liberation from racialized colonial injustice. Many young pro-Palestine activists thus see Palestinian nationalism not only as a social justice imperative but as a specifically antiracist movement. That so many of today’s antiracist activists shortsightedly assume that racism, privilege, and power operate the exact same ways transnationally enables them to apply Western frameworks of race and racism to the rest of the world, including Israel and Palestine, without engaging the critical reflexivity needed to recognize the ethnocentricity of such an approach. When mapped onto the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, a binary racial framework combines with existing antisemitic tropes about Jewish power and turns Israel and Jews into “hyper-whites” or “superwhites,” regardless of skin color.

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In 2024, during the encampments, I spoke with a white woman professor in an elite, predominantly white institution who claimed she was “proud” of her students for engaging in protest because they “aren’t usually political.” (Apparently, the content of students’ political protest was less significant to this professor than the very fact of their politicization. Still, I imagine she would have exhibited less pride had her students protested against diversity and inclusion initiatives or in support of ICE raids, or if they had worn white robes and hoods instead of keffiyehs and balaclavas.) Notably, this professor remarked that her students “weren’t very active when George Floyd was killed” in the summer of 2020. Remember one of the classic functions of antisemitism: political displacement, or scapegoating. In a society where racial discourse has traditionally operated along a Black/white binary, and wherein Black men have been significant targets of police brutality, police officers are viewed by many in social justice circles as functionaries of systemic racial injustice. At a predominantly white institution, where white students benefit from the privileges of whiteness, white students protesting the murder of a Black man by police would require a critical examination of the privileges they have but which Floyd had not. In comparison, protesting the murder, thousands of miles away, of Palestinians, whom they conceptualize as nonwhite victims (regardless of Palestinians’ skin color, the actions of Hamas terrorists, or the agency of Palestinians in supporting Hamas to represent them) by the Israeli military, which they view as the arm of the white state (regardless of Israelis’ skin color or the needs and right of a state to defend itself against genocidal terrorism) is far easier.

In other words, by protesting against Israel, white students in the United States can believe they are challenging systemic injustice without any requirement to substantively engage with their own privilege or complicity. For white American student activists, the psychic benefits of displacing whiteness, racism, and systemic injustice onto Israel negate any potential impulse to question their own standing in the United States or their presumptions about the issues supposedly central to their activism. They need not wonder, for example, why the only Jewish country in the world is framed as an exclusionary, global, colonial superpower, despite being surrounded by countries from which Jews were exiled, how it is that so many supposedly white Israelis actually have dark skin, or why the Israeli military was in Gaza in the first place, despite not having had a presence there in nearly a decade leading up to the October 7 massacre of Israelis by the Palestinian-elected terrorist group Hamas.

Moreover, because whiteness has historical roots in European Christianity, and because Judaism has historically been Christianity’s immediate Other, those who frame Israeli Jews as white oppressors are actually reinforcing, not challenging, whiteness. Ill-informed anti-Israel activism thus cements both a Christian-inflected white worldview and a reductive antiracist stance that requires little education on the issues they claim to care about and even less self-examination.

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Racial Identity Development

In the wake of 2020’s pseudo-racial reckoning—I say “pseudo” because it hasn’t actually eradicated anti-Black racism—students, especially young white students, have been increasingly, if self-consciously, cognizant of the privileges afforded to those with light skin in the United States. Many theories of racial identity development suggest that, as one learns about injustice, they can become consumed by the need to share their new knowledge with others, but that individuals ideally will move into a place of integration wherein racial identity is only part of a healthy self-concept. In Asian American identity development models, for example, this incorporation is preceded by an “awakening” marked by anti-establishment perspectives, often influenced by “campus politics.”1 Black identity development theories suggest that once individuals recognize the saliency of anti-Black racism, they may initially devote their energies less to developing a healthy Black self-image than to overtly challenging and rejecting everything they associate with whiteness.2 Notably, many identity development scholars label this stage “resistance.” It should not escape readers that this is the same term anti-Israel activists have used to praise Hamas’s October 7 massacre.

There are many horrific aspects of equating gang rape and mass murder to “resistance,” but an intriguing aspect to this equivalency is that, in racial identity development, resistance is not the goal but instead an ideally temporary phase marked by anger and rage rather than a healthy self-concept. One must move past this phase to integrate their new knowledge alongside all the other knowledges and characteristics of themselves, to develop a healthy identity as an individual in a socially structured world. For white people, this may entail a process of continued self-reflection and learning from other cultural groups, rather than denigrating or idealizing other people based on shared identity characteristics. Anti-white attitudes and activism at the resistance stage of white identity development demonstrate neither allyship nor enlightenment, in large part because these efforts are motivated not by the desire to build a more equitable world but instead, as identity development theorists Rita Hardiman and Molly Keehn have noted, by “negative feelings such as guilt and shame which lead people to want to distance themselves from their whiteness.”3

It seems that contemporary social justice theorists and activists have gotten stuck in early stages of racial identity development, and, rather than grapple with what they have learned about systems of racism and colonialism (or recognize that they have learned precious little, if anything at all, about Jewishness or antisemitism), they are driven not by collective cultural understandings or overlapping identities but instead by resistance to those outside of their designated community and a missionary impulse to spread the word.

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White Women’s Transaction of Privilege

The pressure to disavow racial privilege may be stronger for white women, who are often seen as beneficiaries or even stewards of white privilege, a view exemplified in popular culture and discourse by the “Karen” figure. Indeed, as Tenisha L. Tevis, Naomi W. Nishi, and I have found, white women seem to be overrepresented in social justice work in educational spaces, a dynamic that may reflect white women’s efforts to avoid being seen as racist or to assuage guilt over their own privileges. “Paradoxically,” we point out in The Gendered Transaction of Whiteness: White Women in Educational Spaces, “the white woman who takes on antiracist work to signal that she is a good white woman who cares about antiracist work actually reifies the logics of whiteness through that very same virtue-signaling behavior.”

White women may be so used to gender subordination and so inculcated into the ways of whiteness that they accept and even transact gendered oppression for the privileges of being included, if in a subordinate role, in the white patriarchy. For the white woman who experiences gendered subordination but light skin privilege, efforts to distance from whiteness may lead to a fetishization of “resistance” that excuses the rape and murder of women if committed by peoples assumed to be nonwhite. What she may not consciously realize, however, is that this fetishization is intrinsically racializing and misogynistic. Because she accepts the subordination of gender to race, she ascribes the same hierarchical system of identity classification to others: thus, an Israeli woman is first Israeli and therefore not a victim, and a Muslim man is first a Muslim, not a rapist. Rather than integrate all aspects of her social identity—or consider anyone else’s—the white woman who proclaims herself an intersectional feminist paradoxically essentializes according to supposed racial categories those with whom she claims allyship.

Reifying Privilege through Allyship

It is not surprising that student activists are stuck in early stages of any sort of identity development, since they are likelier than not to be adolescents and young adults. After all, part of what characterizes most student activism is the youth of the protestors. It is more troubling that scholars and educators encourage students to embrace a rageful resistance rather than a healthy integration. Alas, one racial identity theory in particular may help us understand that dynamic and why it is so prevalent. Janet Helms’s white identity development theory is problematic for multiple reasons, including its presumption of Jewish whiteness and limited accounting for populations outside the Black/white binary, but it is foundational in social justice circles. This model suggests that the white person who abandons anti-Black racism will experience a “cognitive restructuring” and “a euphoria perhaps akin to a religious rebirth”; at this stage, the white person focuses on “the goal of changing White people.” That this impulse to proselytize, so to speak, is informed by Christian discourses, the same Christian discourses that inform whiteness, goes unacknowledged in Helms’s work.

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Though a full examination of the reasons for the limited examination of Christianity in social justice frameworks is outside the scope of this essay, it is worth noting that Christianity, specifically through the significant involvement of Black churches, historically provided a foundational framework for civil rights activism in the United States. For some populations, then, while Christianity once determined the tangible and conceptual structures of oppression, it also provided the tools for liberation. Still, Christianity remains a largely unexamined dimension of whiteness and racism as well as antisemitism.

The supposed antiracists who acknowledge antisemitism only insofar as it is committed by right-wing pundits or Christian Nationalists should—but rarely do—consider how their own activism might be informed by similar, if less overtly expressed, belief systems. The white woman who performatively resists the whiteness into which she has been socialized but rationalizes the motivating ideologies and impacts of Islamist fundamentalist violence as “resistance” merely trades one patriarchy for another. That both Christianity’s and Islam’s intrinsic Other, by virtue of cultural history and religious origin, is Judaism means that any antisemitism the white woman has absorbed from Christian society she may have limited reason to question in the context of Islamism.

Today’s student activists may have learned the terminology of critical literacy, but they haven’t learned how to fully apply its cognitive dispositions, and they are so preoccupied with pointing out Israel’s white oppressor colonial racism that they aren’t stopping to consider that maybe they themselves are the racists.

Topics: Israel Initiative

Mara Lee Grayson’s books include Antisemitism and the White Supremacist Imaginary (Peter Lang, 2023) and Teaching Racial Literacy (Rowman & Littlefield, 2018). Previously a tenured associate professor of rhetoric and composition at California State University, Dominguez Hills, she now works as the director of education for the Campus Climate Initiative at Hillel International.

By chance this past January found me working on Leo Strauss’s “What Is Political Philosophy?” while sojourning in Jerusalem.1 It just so happens that it was “in this city, and in this land,” “on this sacred soil” and bearing “what Jerusalem stands for” ever in mind, that some seventy years earlier Strauss had originally delivered this essay as three lectures at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.2 The cause of my situation was twofold. First, I had spent the first five days of January teaching the essay as part of the University of Austin’s yearly Symposium on Leo Strauss. I was also scheduled to deliver a paper in early February at Notre Dame’s Political Theory Colloquium. For the latter occasion, I had decided to prepare my own commentary on Strauss’s text, to be submitted for review toward the end of the month. So it happened that my January was to be entirely devoted to reading, teaching, interpreting, and writing on Strauss’s piece. The second cause was an invitation from my friend Titus Techera to join a group of academic and media-adjacent people for a study tour of Israel, with a focus on Jewish history and Israeli politics, scheduled for about a week between my return from Austin and the submission of my paper to the colloquium. January thus became overwhelmingly busy. Sensing the urgency of the situation, I hurried to write the paper as quickly as I could while still in Austin, up until the tour began, but my commentary on Strauss quickly ballooned, so that it was looking more and more like I was going to produce a short book rather than a long essay. Restricting myself to Strauss’s first lecture helped somewhat, but it quickly became evident that I would still have to spend some of my time in Jerusalem working on “What Is Political Philosophy?” Such was indeed the case: in the early mornings and late evenings, or while riding around the country by bus, I found the occasional hour to read Strauss, write my notes on his text, read related materials from Spinoza to Swift and beyond, and outline the remaining paragraphs of my essay. So did the world find me.

There was a second connection between the text and my trip, and that was famed Zionist and Israeli national hero Theodor Herzl, whom Strauss mentions briefly but pointedly in the first lecture, but whose name also graced the group that had organized my trip and on whose behalf Mr. Techera had invited me, The Herzl Institute. The Herzl Institute is home to a number of initiatives advancing Jewish thought, education, and history, all with the purpose of meeting “the challenges ahead through a more rigorous engagement with the riches of Hebrew Scripture and rabbinic sources.” The institute’s president is noted Israeli political theorist Yoram Hazony, who through the Edmund Burke Foundation, for which he serves as chairman, organizes the National Conservatism Conference. These activities, along with his books on the State of Israel, nationalism, and conservatism, have earned Dr. Hazony his well-deserved reputation as a prominent voice in the nationalist wing of the global conservative movement. It would be poor manners on my part not to express my gratitude for the great generosity of my hosts and the thoughtful care they put into the program, evident in every aspect of the week’s activities.

The week started with a lecture by Dr. Hazony on the Biblical roots of Israeli nationalism. He focused on two passages in particular, Deuteronomy 30 and Ezekiel 37, both of which attest that the return of the Jews to their land will be both a spiritual and a political affair. The spiritual return is obviously first in importance, if not also to be first in time, which in turn raises questions of great importance, if not of the highest importance, about the religious or spiritual depth and legitimacy of the State of Israel today and in its recent history. I do not here refer to the questions of identity that emerge between the secular left and the religious right in Israel. These questions are rather secondary to the more profound questions that typically arise only at the margins among the orthodox, between the religious right and the anti-Zionists among the Haredim or, as they are typically referred to in the West, “the ultra-Orthodox.” That these questions are asked only at the margins does not make them any less important. That impression is rather a product of the shallowness instilled in us by the modern, liberal state, and the narrow questions it compels us to ask. The deeper question, regarding the character of the return or teshuva, has dogged Zionism since its ascendancy in the late nineteenth century, and it is one with which Strauss, too, wrestled as a young Zionist in Germany.

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Strauss recounted his struggle in his late autobiographical “Preface” to the 1965 edition of Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, originally published in 1928, that is, at the end of his Zionist period. Both here and in “What Is Political Philosophy?,” Strauss criticized the “strictly political Zionism” of Herzl and Leon Pinsker for paying insufficient attention to “the foundation, the authoritative layer, of Jewish heritage.” For that foundation does not present itself as purely political, nor even as cultural, and hence as a product of the human mind, but “as a divine gift, as divine revelation.”3 Strauss already saw early on that Herzl’s and Pinsker’s project of political and cultural Zionism presupposed a critique of divine revelation, such as Spinoza had purported to provide. Strauss eventually captured this realization in strikingly poetic language:

Considerations like [these] made one wonder whether an unqualified return to Jewish orthodoxy was not both possible and necessary—was not at the same time the solution to the problem of the Jew lost in the non-Jewish modern world and the only course compatible with sheer consistency or intellectual probity. Vague difficulties remained like small faraway clouds on a beautiful summer sky. They soon took the shape of Spinoza.4

In the wake of this realization, Strauss undertook what Herzl and Pinsker had ignored, and what Hermann Cohen and Franz Rosenzweig had, on his telling, recognized but understood inadequately and thus accomplished only incompletely, namely, a rigorous evaluation of the assumptions underlying Spinoza’s approach to Biblical criticism and a corresponding modification of its results. The insufficiency of political Zionism thus compelled Strauss, as a matter of “intellectual probity” and under the pressures of reason itself, to take seriously the possibility of orthodoxy and therefore the tenability of the apparently naïve belief in miracles and divine revelation.

Strauss alludes to this problem in “What Is Political Philosophy?,” though he is careful only to allude to it and not to state it outright—it was certainly a sensitive issue for his audience in 1954–55, much as it is for their heirs today. He mentions Herzl and Pinsker as examples of political theory, indicating that for the full elaboration of their position one must look beyond them, ultimately to Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, specifically its third and sixteenth chapters. In the next paragraph, Strauss offers just a definition of political theology, though an admirably succinct one, as “political teachings which are based on divine revelation.”5 A mere glance at Herzl’s Judenstaat or Pinsker’s Auto-Emancipation suffices to reveal the total absence of references to “Hebrew Scripture and rabbinic sources.” Strauss, on the other hand, had opened “What Is Political Philosophy?” with a quote from Isaiah’s prophecy of the return of the Jewish people to their land.6 We do not mean to suggest that Strauss was of all things a political theologian. We mean only to indicate with what seriousness the political philosopher, in contrast with the political theorist, takes the claims of the righteous and the faithful, a seriousness far greater than the political theorist. I must add that, on this account, I am reluctant to call Dr. Hazony a political theorist, at least of Herzl’s or Pinsker’s type. His work in political theory seems instead ministerial to a project that falls more properly under the banner of political theology. Obscuring the situation is the fact that Dr. Hazony has not published his thoughts on the Biblical basis of the State of Israel. I will return to this fact near the end.

Naturally enough, then, did the issue of Herzl’s “secularism” arise during the question-and-answer period following Dr. Hazony’s opening remarks. And naturally, too, did he come prepared with a brief essay of Herzl’s relevant to this question, the “Menorah” of 1897.7 Dr. Hazony read at length, and to evident effect, Herzl’s description of an artist whose experience of unabating and growing antisemitism fills him with such “psychic torment” as to encourage in him a “return to Judaism.” Herzl represents the choice as between secularism and orthodoxy, and in particular an orthodoxy characterized by the conviction that the return to Judaism is “the only one way out of this Jewish suffering.” In the passages cited by Strauss, Spinoza had criticized the Biblical and divine basis of the election of the Jewish people and had supplied instead a natural basis to the modern liberal state, and a quasi-Hobbesian one at that. In the “Menorah,” Herzl evidently accepts, wittingly or not, Spinoza’s proposed natural basis for the modern state and attempts therefrom to envision a sort of return, if not to orthodoxy and to the promised land, at least to the beginnings of religious observance and practice. There is an all-too-obvious problem with his vision, not least in that Herzl roots the spiritual choice to return in the material necessity of physical survival. Herzl therefore has no response to the Haredim who refuse to end the Galut through human means. Or rather his response is too lacking in the sweet and sentimental tone found in “Menorah” to be included therein. The artist’s detractors are by and large secular skeptics, too much under the sway of the Spinozist justification for assimilation; thanks to “the courage of his conviction,” however, he is well-equipped simply to ignore them. Herzl can thus spare his artist the dirty work of addressing secularists and anti-Zionists directly—he instead takes that work upon himself. The most notorious of his addresses is his “Mauschel,” published only a few months earlier and in the same publication. There Herzl engages in what can only be called the character assassination of his opponents, returning again and again to the refrain: “No true Jew can be anti-Zionist.” To be sure, Herzl does attempt to carve out room for genuine criticism or even opposition, yet he is obviously inconsistent on this point. His inconsistencies suggest not a sophisticated or nuanced position so much as a moral discomfort with the unseemly passions his most determined opponents arouse in him. Need we even point out that he is willing to slander not just the apostate Spinoza with the derogatory term “Mauschel” but also those rabbis opposed to his project?

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The heart of the matter concerns what state of the soul ought to govern the spiritual return of the Jews, and whether it should occur before or after the political return to the promised land. The latter question is not for me to answer, but the former, in any case, is a question of political psychology. Herzl’s vision—of fear for survival engendering sentimental affection, engendering practice and ritual, which are then deepened and made enduring in the next generations—is lacking in a crucial respect, the philosophic critique of the Enlightenment, more precisely, the philosophic critique of the Enlightenment critique of religion, still more precisely, the philosophic critique of Spinoza. The difficulty appears to be that those most competent to criticize Spinoza, the orthodox, are not inclined to spend much time on him, to say nothing of taking him deadly seriously, while those willing to take him quite seriously are not inclined to be persuaded back to orthodoxy. Something like this difficulty is at play throughout Strauss’s later “Preface” to Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, and it should deepen our appreciation for his rare combination of rigorous critique, on one hand, and openness to old and apparently outdated possibilities, on the other. Strauss aside, we see in this case that religious orthodoxy’s great friend and Enlightenment secularism’s great enemy is political philosophy—in other words, that political theology might find in political philosophy an ally, not to say a handmaid, in its critique of modernity. Orthodoxy of all kinds has proven stubborn to the Enlightenment project, a testament to modernity’s spiritual shortcomings, while political philosophy stands equipped to expose its rational shortcomings, if nothing else. In so doing, political philosophy opens the door to a reacquaintance with the deepest, most powerful longings of the human soul and so makes possible a spiritual return that would otherwise risk remaining unwittingly under the influence of modern ideas. Some such insight seems to me to inform Strauss’s critique of Herzl, whose wavering between the sentimental and the fearful betrays an unorthodox kinship with various trends of modern thought.

Political theology might better be understood, then, as a way of life, rather than as a primarily scholarly or academic pursuit. For it requires a certain diligence not just about how Scripture applies to the general situation a people finds itself in but also about how it inspires the various tasks each undertakes, day to day, week to week, year to year, and over one’s lifetime as a whole. This is what I saw every day as we made our way around Israel. A vintner in the West Bank proudly summarized his chosen way of life by quoting Scripture: “Thou shalt yet plant vines upon the mountains of Samaria” (Jeremiah 3:15). A farmer in the Golan Heights had us meet him beside his fields, and surveying their expanse he spoke of how he, as a modern farmer, diligently met the numerous strictures the Halakha places upon his work. The Torah commands the sacrifice of “a red heifer without spot, wherein is no blemish, and upon which never came yoke” (Numbers 19:2), and in case Israel should one day succeed in building a third temple, there wait near Shiloh, the ancient site of the tabernacle, a few such heifers, sourced from Texas. And I would be remiss to omit how every speaker or guest I encountered would enumerate their children and grandchildren, how many grandparents I met who were in their early 50s, how diligently, in short, all heed the command “Be fruitful, and multiply” (Genesis 1:28). Amid the proceedings Dr. Hazony attended the funeral of his uncle, whose children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren numbered over a hundred. These examples, and many others besides, attest to how deeply and granularly Scripture and the Halakha pervade the daily existence of many modern Israelis, compelling them to the thoughtful integration of their ancient, prophesied destiny of return into every aspect of their modern lives—these are people convinced that the theological life is worth living. What makes their way of life especially political is the pervasive sense that each is doing his job in contributing to the national task of return and revival—also of defense. This was evident from a discussion of defense technologies by Dr. Yuval Steinitz of Rafael Advanced Defense Systems, all the more from a dinner we shared with some soldiers in the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). We enjoyed a meal of grilled meats outdoors at their camp; it was a scene that, like many others in Israel, reminded one of Plato’s Republic. But I was reminded, too, of God’s command to Joshua and his troops: “Only be thou strong and very courageous, that thou mayest observe to do according to all the law” (Joshua 1:7).

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The case for the secular left in Israel was made for us by Adam Shinar, Associate Professor of Law at the Harry Radzyner Law School at Reichman University. Prof. Shinar gave us his rundown of the controversy concerning proposed reforms to the Israeli Supreme Court; we also heard the opposing view from Simcha Rothman, the Knesset Member who has led the charge for judicial reform. Proposed by the Netanyahu government in January 2023, the reform and the controversy surrounding it are less important to me here than the question both parties admit is at stake in the issue: whether Israeli’s identity as a Jewish state is to take priority over its identity as a liberal democracy, or vice versa. On July 26, 2023, the New York Times published an op-ed penned by Shinar arguing against the proposed reforms, in which he expressed consternation about gender diversity and Palestinian and other minorities.8 Tensions between the left and right boiled over into protests that summer, yet it was all effectively neutralized when, on October 7, 2023, Hamas-led terror attacks initiated a war in Gaza that continues to this day. Hamas likely sought to exploit the existing political tensions in Israel, but much to their surprise—and to the surprise, too, of many Israelis—the attacks brought in their wake a marked uptick in religious sentiment and devotion among Israelis. It is not hard to see why. As they made their way out into the Gaza envelope, the attackers came upon a music festival, where they engaged in the rape, murder, and mutilation of nearly 400 of the young people in attendance. Those targeted were hardly members of the religious right—that’s obvious enough from how they had chosen to spend the holiday sabbath of Simchat Torah. That is, there could be no denial that the attackers did not seek freedom from their oppressors, as the narrative on the left typically goes, but were out for blood, for Jewish blood. Is it any wonder, then, that the secular left in Israel has lost power, to the point of nearly ceasing to exist?

Prof. Shinar is clearly an exception. As of the time of writing, his profile on the social media platform X still features his op-ed pinned to the top of his feed: the events of six weeks later have, it appears, not aroused an appreciable change of heart. In keeping with his liberal priorities, he complained, both during and after his remarks, about not being able to take public transportation on the Sabbath. In a land brimming with religious self-sacrifice, it is laughable to bristle so at such inconveniences. More distasteful, however, was his urgent desire to leave Jerusalem, where he had come to speak with us, and return to Tel Aviv, expressing without reservation and before his orthodox hosts his aversion toward his people’s ancestral home. I bring this up not to accuse him of poor manners but of gross contradiction, that he is at once devoted to his promised land but not to its holiest sites. This is typical, I have been told, of the left-leaning residents of Tel Aviv. I spoke with a young liberal woman while there, and she referred to Jerusalem as “our most violently treasured heap of stone and concrete.” She at least had enough taste for consistency of opinion that she was eager to emigrate to the United States. Had she Shinar’s devotion, or Shinar her consistency, they might have confronted the full weight of their souls’ commitment and asked themselves what sort of life it demands of them. They might have asked themselves, as Strauss had a century earlier, whether a return to orthodoxy is possible, and possible for them, whether their path, in other words, is one of assimilation, of flight, or of return.

Strauss faced a similar and starker version of this question during his emigration from Germany in the 1930s. In an interesting exchange with his old friend Jacob Klein, Strauss articulates with uncharacteristic frankness the extent of his religious devotion:

And even if we were to be huddled into the ghetto once again and thus be compelled to go to the synagogue and to observe the law in its entirety, then this too we would have to do as philosophers, i.e., with a reserve which, if ever so tacit, must for that very reason be all the more determined....[R]evelation and philosophy are at one in their opposition to sophistry, i.e., the whole of modern philosophy.

Chastising Klein for his “conversion to theism” in 1933 amid the Jewish emigration from Germany, Strauss bluntly stated his position: “there is no need to ‘crawl back to the cross,’ I mean, to speak of ‘God.’”9 It is from this ironic and consistent perspective that Strauss embraced Zionism, not from the confused devotion of Shinar, nor from the courageous conviction of Herzl’s artist. What the left in Israel might learn from Strauss is that their pretense of Enlightenment rationality amounts to little more than “sophistry”—they might learn, in other words, the high expectations modern atheism has of reason, in the face of reason’s much more limited powers. Strauss himself would years later speak of a “shipwreck” in his thinking that disrupted the tidy and confident picture he painted in his correspondence with Klein.10 His path from Spinoza led him to Maimonides, Al-Farabi, and the Socratics, while also forcing a deepened confrontation with modernity, in particular with Machiavelli, as articulating the alternative to the Socratic orientation by fundamental problems.11 Strauss thus placed an incredible onus on would-be atheists and secularists, a great burden of proof to earn their conclusions rather than follow them blindly as unquestioned convictions. Whatever one thinks of Strauss’s work on the problem of reason and revelation, however misguided one might find his inquiries, one cannot deny that he proves by his example, positively or negatively, the need to take orthodoxy seriously.

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Shinar is in a way emblematic of the problem Strauss identifies in Herzl’s vision. The return that fear engenders risks being misinterpreted under the rubric of Spinozistic self-defense, according to which the alternatives of return or assimilation are a matter of practical judgment rather than prophetic vision and divine providence. Strauss summarized the consequences of Herzl’s position as follows:

Political Zionism, then, strictly understood was the movement of an elite on behalf of a community constituted by common descent and common degradation, for the restoration of their honor through the acquisition of statehood and therefore of a country—of any country: the land which the strictly political Zionism promised to the Jews was not necessarily the land of Israel.12

Strauss refers here to Herzl’s proposal of establishing a Jewish state in Uganda, an effort, I have been told, that still affects his reputation today, particularly among the Haredim. Why “in this land” and “on this sacred soil,” if not because it was promised to you by your God and His prophets? And if that promise still moves you and binds your soul, why not also His law, without your adherence to which His promise must needs remain unfulfilled? Dr. Hazony’s wife, Yael Hazony, told the story of traveling to Israel to stay with her future husband’s uncle and aunt. She recalled fondly how Dr. Hazony’s aunt one day looked out onto the land and said, “Isn’t it beautiful?” The future Mrs. Hazony then responded, “But it’s just a bunch of rocks.” “Yes, but they’re Jewish rocks,” she replied with evident gratitude and joy. Could a religious sentiment so admirably fond and grateful in its devotion to rocky soil ever arise in the souls of those who dismiss Jerusalem itself as a “heap of stone and concrete”?

I’ll conclude by returning to the subject of Dr. Hazony’s opening lecture, the Biblical roots of the State of Israel. Much of Dr. Hazony’s work involves a noble and quite successful effort to build and strengthen the often-faltering bridges between Israel and her Western allies, against the twin, and increasingly linked, threats of the secular left and radical Islam. His work on nationalism in particular has identified a deep kinship between the Biblical story of God’s chosen people, His nation, and those on the right across the West who wish to restore to their nation a healthy confidence in their common descent. On Dr. Hazony’s account, the American formula “one Nation under God” gives voice to a national and religious devotion that is Biblical in origin and global in significance.13 It is a striking feature of the nationalist movement that it is international in reach. The same could not be said of the German nationalists a century earlier. No doubt it is the postwar international liberal order’s indefatigable erosion of our particular devotions and commitments that has produced a global backlash. Dr. Hazony has the good sense to see that the events of the Second World War have tamed considerably the wilder passions of yesteryear’s nationalists. But my travels in Israel made me wish to hear him expound at greater length upon something everywhere evident but that he has not yet articulated sufficiently, namely, the political theology of the modern State of Israel. Dr. Hazony strikes me as better positioned than anyone else to offer an account, in terms of Scripture itself and with great theoretical clarity, of how the State of Israel today might fulfill its prophesied destiny, God’s ancient promise of return, on one hand, while remaining a modern, technological nation-state, if not also a liberal democracy, on the other. When I asked Dr. Hazony at the end of the week whether he has written on the Biblical foundations of the State of Israel, he said that he has not. I would be grateful for such reflections from his pen, and I trust the same is true also of his fellow Israelis.

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Postscript on War

Another word is called for on Israel as a modern, technological state. October 7th had the spiritual effect described above, as well as the political effect of galvanization around the defense of Israel. Dr. Steinitz told the story of the Twelve-Day War between Israel and Iran, an engagement that was almost entirely technological in character. He told likewise of the incredible advances in military technology, namely, their Iron Beam laser defense system and Trophy active tank defense system. These terrifying wonders, awesome in their capabilities, are absolutely essential to the survival and success of the modern State of Israel, surrounded as she is on every side by her enemies—seven against Israel, as it were. It is therefore a matter of the highest existential importance that she settle the question of how an ancient religion can also be a modern technological state. Spinoza refers to the welfare of an imperium as the “highest law.”14 That the Halakah allows one to suspend strict obedience for the sake of national security and survival suggests some agreement between the Bible and modern philosophy when it comes to war. But there is also reason to suspect great disagreement. The classics, Strauss argued, “demanded the strict moral-political supervision of inventions,” that is, of technology. Thus,

the good and wise city will determine which inventions are to be made use of and which are to be suppressed. Yet they were forced to make one crucial exception. They had to admit the necessity of encouraging inventions pertaining to the art of war. They had to bow to the necessity of defense or of resistance....They had to admit in other words that in an important respect the good city has to take its bearings by the practice of bad cities or that the bad impose their law on the good.15

But today, when these necessities bear upon us with untold weight, is it still possible for Israel to retain its ancient conviction? What today provokes greater fear, reverence, or awe? Scripture or Leviathan?

I end with a Biblical example, the story of Naboth and Jezebel, a favorite of Strauss’s.16 Asked by King Ahab for his vineyards, the obedient Naboth refuses, as God has forbidden him to give away his ancestral inheritance (1 Kings 21:1–3). Ahab thwarted, Jezebel comes to his aid by falsely accusing Naboth of cursing both God and king, the result of which is Naboth’s death by stoning (vv. 9–14). Naboth does eventually receive justice with the ascent of Jehu, but his vengeance turns out to be shockingly morally suspect, not least in his following God’s Machiavellian advice, or rather command, to “eliminate the blood line of the prince” (see 2 Kings 9:6–8 and Machiavelli, The Prince, ch. 4). Jehu’s other morally suspect actions in this chapter include conspiracy (vv. 2, 14), deceit (vv. 11–12), inciting sedition (vv. 18–19), and killing a fleeing man from behind (vv. 23–24). We might excuse these actions as necessary to justice, or as matters of political necessity, but this is only to affirm the difficulty that it is not those without blame, like Naboth, who ensure justice perseveres, but those who recognize the necessity of morally suspect acts to righting the wrongs of this world. It is ultimately Jehu who stands up to the line of Ahab on Naboth’s soil (vv. 21, 24–25). Naboth may be blameless, but righteousness so pure makes one the victim of conspiracies and plots; it is rather Jehu’s willingness to plot, like Jezebel, but in service of God and his prophet Elisha, in service of God’s plan, that gives him, and not Naboth, the right to rule. But however much Jehu’s plotting, especially his elimination of Ahab’s line, may be in service of the Lord, it also makes his house deserving of divine punishment (see Hosea 1:4–5). Jehu’s line is punished for the very act that God’s prophet had commanded him to perform. The forbidden is necessary, the Bible concedes, but also necessarily punished. To which Machiavelli might well reply, “This point is deserving of notice and of being imitated by others.”

Topics: Israel Initiative

Alex Priou is Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of Austin and Roubos Sabbatical Scholar at the Benson Center for the Study of Western Civilization at the University of Colorado Boulder. He is the author of three books on Plato, most recently Musings on Plato's Symposium, as well as numerous articles on ancient Greek philosophy and poetry and the history of political philosophy. He writes regularly at The Close Read on Substack.

The following interview was conducted in Berlin in the summer of 2025 and was originally published in German in the online magazine haGalil.

Verena Buser

Dear Ahmed, I am very pleased that you are here. Can you please introduce yourself?

Ahmed Albaba

I was born and raised in a so-called refugee camp in the West Bank, but I prefer the name Judea and Samaria, for good reason. I can go into that if you like. I first studied psychology there and then came to Germany, where I completed my master’s and doctorate degrees in social science. My research focuses on the collective memory of Palestinian families in the camps. I was also active in several research projects in Israel and Jordan.

My work led to a change of perspective for me. As I reflected on my own biography, I asked myself the question: what prevents us Palestinians from having a democracy? And I concluded that there are two ways of thinking in Palestinian communities. Or rather two projects. The first project is a development project, one in which people are concerned with everyday life. They want normal things like a good job and a good family, a good house and so on. They want to develop society and lead a normal life.

On the other hand, there’s also another project. I call it the resistance project—this term is in common use, anyway—and it’s based on the “Palestinian cause.” The goal is to liberate Palestinians from the Jews. It’s based on an ideology of hate, and the aim is to fight—against the West, but above all against Israel, against Jews and against Zionism.

In the course of my research but also as a result of reflecting on lived experience, my biography and the history of my family, I became convinced that the second project is a major obstacle to the democratization, secularization, and modernization of Palestinian society in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

It is important for me to emphasize that I do not want to offend anyone when I say that the “Palestinian cause” is an obstacle for us Palestinians. What I actually want to say is that we Palestinians now have a great opportunity to free ourselves from these ideologies and also to modernize, secularize, and democratize our society. But to do this, we have to give up this struggle, this resistance project, which is also a terror project. And my experience shows me that such statements offend many Palestinians. They feel attacked when you say that. But it’s not actually against Palestinians or against anyone. It’s quite the opposite. It’s for Palestinians, for Palestinian society. I wish the best for this society, and I want to do something for it. My words and my actions are my contribution to this.

You get so caught up in this tradition of the “Palestinian cause.” It’s like a religion. You don’t always act rationally in terms of purpose but rather in terms of values. And if you act value-rationally—which can be driven purely by emotion—there is a danger that the outcome, i.e., the results, are not really in your own interests. But my approach is that we should think rationally for a purpose—pragmatically—and in this way we can modernize and democratize our society.

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Verena Buser

Can you explain to me how the “Palestinian cause” hinders the democratization or secularization processes?

Ahmed Albaba

It was created by the Arab world. The representatives of this project are Palestinian organizations founded by Arabs. I am referring specifically to the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), established in 1964 by Gamal Abdel Nasser. At that time, there was no Israeli occupation. So the idea was to fight against the “Zionist project.” That was the 1960s, and now it’s 2025. But the language hasn’t changed. We can’t continue to think as if we were in living in the previous century. We need a new language. We can’t keep talking about the “fight against Zionism,” the “fight against Israel,” and the “fight against the Jews.” These are the obsolete slogans of the many factions of the PLO but also of political Islam.

This is a big obstacle, because the young generation is not striving for progress, not for economic goals, not for careers, not for things that are normal in the Western world. Instead, it fights against Zionism, Israel, and the Jews. The struggle takes place on various levels, including among Palestinian intellectuals, academics, and artists. Everyone in these circles is involved. They don’t deal with the real problems of society but create the image of an enemy and fight against it. And this fight costs us a lot.

In principle, the “Palestinian cause” operates on three levels. On a physical level, the goal is to physically eliminate Jews. There is this fantasy that if you eliminate Jews, then you liberate yourself.

On the next level, the narrative level, there are the contributions of academics and artists or historians. They try to establish a narrative in which Jews do not appear, i.e., to eliminate Jews at the narrative level. That’s why I say I come from Judea and Samaria—because by doing so I recognize that this area has a history, a Jewish history. The West Bank is a term that was established by the British Mandate administration. They created the East Bank and thus also this term, West Bank. So the Jordanians adopted it and the Palestinians as well. But if you look closely, the term “West Bank” is new. It’s a designation, not a name.

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Judea and Samaria, by contrast, is a term that has an ancient history. And it shows that we inhabitants of the place have a—very long—history. If we renounce it, then we renounce an important part of our identity. But in order to develop an identity, I think we have to recognize this Jewish component of our history—not only acknowledge it but also adopt it into our cultural self-understanding. We are Arabs, we are Muslims, we are Christians. Yes, but we also have this Jewish tradition, Jewish heritage, and we must affirm this aspect of our reality too.

To make this more concrete: There are the ruins of the Hisham Palace in Jericho. Pupils should be taken there to show that we have an Islamic history and so on. But five kilometers away is Herod’s Palace, and nobody goes there. I think that’s a sign of failure. You have a great history, a great tradition, a very, very old history. Why deny it? It’s not good for our culture, our identity, or our humanism. The complexity of our inheritance isn’t against anyone—it’s an enrichment.

Verena Buser

So is this “resistance project” also about a lack of ideological criticism?

Ahmed Albaba

The so-called resistance project is actually a terror project. They try to legitimize terror by using nice sounding words, but in reality it’s a justification and legitimization of terror. But terror is not actually in the interest of the Palestinians.

It distracts us from our real problems. We have a lot of problems in Palestinian society, but because of this so-called resistance project, there’s no capacity to focus on the real problems and deal with solutions. We have economic problems. We also have patriarchal structures. There are still honor killings. We need a solution. And the academics and the artists and so on, they don’t care about these problems. If there’s an art project, it’s about occupation and how to develop a narrative against the Zionist narrative. But do we really need that? For me it’s a pseudo-occupation. We need solutions for the real problems in society.

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Verena Buser

There’s a rather monolithic image of Palestinians in the West currently that’s been strongly influenced by so-called “pro-Palestinian demonstrations.” In contrast, your comments are very differentiated. Why do you think you could be described as an “unheard Palestinian voice”?

Ahmed Albaba

Well, first of all, I think it’s partly my own fault that my voice is not loud. But I also have good reasons why my voice is quieter than ideally it should be. Because of this “Palestinian cause,” many people, especially young people, believe that if they fight on these three levels—physical, narrative, and moral—then they are on the right side of history, and this belief gives them the justification, the legitimization for terrorist attacks, for denial and also for insults. The Palestinians know this because we grew up with it.

I was like that myself. I remember I was very young, maybe 18 or 19 years old. Someone was talking about a journalist whom he called a collaborator—he was working “with Jews, with the Yahud or Israel,” and was therefore a “traitor,” in effect. They told me to take the journalist’s camera away. I went to him and took his camera away. The man was so scared of me. It was unbelievable because he knew very well that I wasn’t alone, and if it came to a physical altercation other people would come and beat him.

Now I’m experiencing the same thing today. I’m the journalist who’s afraid of Palestinian teenagers who believe that if they beat me or kill me or ruin my reputation, then they’re doing something good for the “Palestinian cause.” That’s how they think. I used to think like that myself when I was their age, but now I realize we urgently need to change. It has to stop immediately! Because if the next generation thinks like that, then we don’t really have any chance of development, democracy, or modernization.

I believe that for many Palestinians who now have a job in Israel, for example, Israel is not the problem for them. On the contrary, Israel is the solution. Because it enables them to improve and establish their economic situation.

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Verena Buser

What motivates you to actively fight against antisemitism?

Ahmed Albaba

I believe that the most important thing of all is that we Palestinians fight against antisemitism, because antisemitism is the reason why these destructive ideologies we’re talking about became established and remain widespread in our society. So if we work against this hatred—I know it’s not that easy, but we have to work to make it go away—then we won’t be so easily manipulated. As long as hatred against Israel is entrenched, you can activate it to quickly mobilize people for terrorist attacks. Therefore, fighting antisemitism is important not only for Palestinians but for the whole world.

Antisemitism is an ideology of hate that divides entire societies. It’s only a matter of time before a society like that collapses—when the cohesion between people breaks down after antisemitism has become an everyday phenomenon. Social peace collapses. And history shows that successively, not just since 1948 in the Arab world, anti-Zionism too has become an ideology of a similar nature. As a consequence, almost all Jews in the Arab world were expelled. That had a negative impact on Arab societies as well.

There were lots of Jewish people who contributed much to society throughout the Middle East—for example, in Egypt. There were artists, people who made important economic contributions. Today there are no Jewish voices in Egypt. The same applies to all Arab countries, including Syria and Jordan. Antisemitism and anti-Zionism are dangerous ideologies that are eating away at society from within.

Verena Buser

Thank you very much for the interview.

Dr. Albaba’s dissertation on “Palestinian Families in the Refugee Camps in the West Bank” is available online here.

Topics: Israel Initiative

Dr. Verena Buser, a Berlin-based historian of the Holocaust, is a research associate of the Holocaust Studies Program at Western Galilee College (Israel) and research associate to the Antisemitism Commissioner in the State of Brandenburg (Germany) and his deputy.

The resolute Israeli preemptive strike against the nuclear program of the Islamic Republic of Iran, symbolically named “Rising Lion” (Hebrew: Am keLavi: “A nation like a lion”), has shown to the world that the Jews are not to be trifled with and that they will take their own defense into their own hands, if necessary, even when facing enormous resistance. The “Muscle Jew” conjured up by the Zionist Max Nordau, a close advisor to Theodor Herzl, and now incarnated by the right-wing conservative Benjamin Netanyahu, seems to have completely displaced, or at least banished to the margins of insignificance, that old type of Jew so ardently yearned for by left-wingers: the spiritualized and multilingual, yet defenseless and cowering, ghetto Jew with his notorious klezmer music and his lovable neuroses, the so-called schlemiel.

This schlemiel is one of the archetypes of Eastern Jewish literature. He is the clumsy, unlucky fellow who gets into one mess after another, yet cuts an extremely comic figure in the process. Even the best scholars have failed to answer the question of the etymological origin of the name. In his late poem Jehuda ben Halevi, Heine lamented that “it has remained unknown, / Like the holy Nile’s springs, / where its origin is,” and then tells his own version: A certain Schlemiel was the one who, during the Exodus from Egypt, was mistakenly slain by an enraged bigot because he had been mistaken for an immoral fellow. Another, far more plausible etymological explanation is that in the rabbinic exegetical text Bereshit Raba, the tribe of Simon is portrayed as particularly poor, and the name of their tribal chieftain, Schlemiel, thus developed into a synonym for the poor wretch and unlucky person par excellence. In any case, the schlemiel curiously first found his way into German literature (in Adelbert von Chamisso’s Peter Schlemihl (1813), who sells his shadow to the devil), while in the Eastern Jewish sphere he was initially transmitted orally. The arguably most famous, though not the most prototypical, literary expression of this type appeared much later, in the main character of Sholem Aleichem’s Tevye the Milkman (1895–1916), the desperately poor Job from the Russian Empire, punished by life with seven daughters, but also a clever bungler who never loses his sense of humor even in the face of financial hardship and persecution (or at times, persecution mania). This schlemiel became world famous via Broadway through the musical adaptation Fiddler on the Roof (1964).

American Jewish literature would later follow in the footsteps of Yiddish literature. But completely unnoticed by researchers—with the exception of American-Jewish philologist Menachem Feuer of the University of Waterloo (Canada)—the Eastern Jewish type of schlemiel from the Tsarist Empire was by no means directly transported to the Western Hemisphere, but rather first to Central Europe, and as early as 1900: Aron Ettore Schmitz, better known by his pseudonym Italo Svevo (1861–1928), was a fully assimilated Trieste Jew who even converted to Catholicism and whose works do not explicitly feature Jewishness. Svevo researchers concluded several decades ago that the first pseudonym he used, Ettore Samigli, represents an Italianized form of schlemiel. What they missed, however, was that it was Svevo who, especially with his last novel, La coscienza di Zeno (1923), translated this Eastern Jewish type into the Western context. His narrator, the amiably awkward Zeno, from the multiethnic trading city that was still part of the Habsburg monarchy, no longer has financial difficulties; on the contrary, he is a rich stockbroker, bored by life and bourgeois conventions; sexual frustration replaces financial worries here. Incredibly funny stories happen to him, too, which he, an incorrigible neurotic, tells his psychoanalyst; the novel consists of these reports to the doctor for the insane.

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American Jewish literature, with Nobel Prize winner Saul Bellow and especially Philip Roth, adopted this Westernized variation on the schlemiel. In his debut novel, Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), Roth even adapted Svevo’s narrative situation with the psychoanalyst. Nevertheless, even this obvious influence by Svevo seems to have largely escaped research; only his biographer Blake Bailey mentions in passing that already the young Roth must have read Italo Svevo intensively, as one of Roth’s early lovers described to the biographer. The eponymous complaint of Roth’s hypersexual Portnoy is primarily of a sexual nature; for with the cultural revolution of 1968, the blonde, Aryan women who seem so desirable to the schlemiel, but who are mostly unattainable for him, increasingly come to the fore, which is why the motif of masturbation also finds its way into schlemiel literature. And when the tormented schlemiel manages to end up with an Aryan woman, he senses antisemitism everywhere, imagining, for example, as in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall (1977), that her WASP family secretly rejects and imagines him as an Eastern Jew with sidelocks and a caftan. In Allen’s movies, the role of schlemiel, suffering from sexual frustration and uprootedness, is often played by comedians with suicidal thoughts, which considerably enhances the comedy of the characters. Finally, in arguably his best film, Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), the schlemiel character is an infertile professional comedian whose wife is inseminated by the sperm of a vigorous, energetic friend—the ultimate humiliation for the schlemiel, who already suffers from a lack of masculinity. When his wife accuses him of having ruined the quality of his semen through “excessive masturbation,” the schlemiel can only reply that she should stop “knocking his hobbies.”

The schlemiel is only possible in the Diaspora. For this archetype has always projected all the hardships experienced by Jews onto a lack of a fatherland of their own: persecution (and the resulting persecution mania), socioeconomic stigmatization, and inferiority complexes toward the representatives of their respective host people, who revile them—either openly, as in the Tsarist Empire, or secretly, as in America—as parasitic. In his own state, as a Jew among Jews, the schlemiel is simply not possible. And the self-image of the Zionist, the manly, sovereign, self-defense-minded Muscle Jew who does not depend on outside help, is diametrically opposed to the schlemiel type. For the Muscle Jew creates his own Jewish state, where the Jew is not oppressed or persecuted by the host population, since he himself represents the host population; where he does not represent a socioeconomic category, since both the lower and upper classes consist of Jews; and where, finally, there are no Aryan women he could pursue and whose rejections would distress him. Furthermore, the Muscle Jew doesn’t go to the psychoanalyst, but to the army.

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The young New York author Joshua Cohen (b. 1980) has recently captured this very dichotomy in his novel The Netanyahus (2022). His narrator, economic historian Ruben Blum, is the only Jew teaching at a small college in rural upstate New York in the late 1950s, surrounded by white Anglo-Saxon Protestants. Growing up in “America, where Jews were busy being deinvented, or uninvented, or assimilated, by democracy and market-forces, intermarriage and miscegenation,” he senses antisemitism everywhere, “these anxieties, these inherited neuroses,” and is constantly afraid of offending others. Even as a family man, he doesn’t cut a particularly impressive figure, subjugated by his wealthy parents-in-law (while he himself comes from a humble background); in addition, he has been unable to inspire any respect, or even healthy self-respect, in his daughter, who wants nothing to do with Judaism. She symbolically labors over her Jewish nose, “which she thought was too long, too big, too bumpy,” and constantly tries to convince her parents of the need for plastic surgery. This Blum, punished by life, is a prototypical schlemiel; and the naturally well-read character knows this as well, calling himself an “embodiment of the under-coordinated, overintellectualizing, self-deprecating male Jewish stereotype that Woody Allen, for instance, and so many Jewish-American literary writers found outlandish financial and sexual success lampooning.”

The plot of the novel is quickly told. In the winter semester of 1959, Blum’s college receives an application from a historian named Benzion Netanyahu, specializing in the history of the Inquisition. Since Blum is the only Jew at the college and his colleagues feel incompetent, the rector immediately orders him to supervise the applicant and help decide on his application. To the fully assimilated Blum, this seems outrageously antisemitic, but he has no choice but to comply. He sits down to study Netanyahu’s writings, although it is not easy for him.

“The history in my regular schooling was all about progress, a world that brightened with the Enlightenment and steadily improved . . . , so long as every country kept trying to be more like America.” The view of history that he was taught at Jewish Sunday school, however, knows no progress, is cyclical, and consists only of a ceaseless recurrence of persecutions: “America wasn’t the new Jerusalem that my public-schooling implied. Rather, it was the newest incarnation of Rome, Athens, Babylon, Egypt. It was Diaspora.” Blum now perceives Netanyahu’s investigations as unscientific, politicized, religious dogmatism; they remind him of “those lost old hoarse-cricket voices of the basement rabbis from long long ago, who with the infelicity and stiffness of another foreigner’s thesaurusized English were murmuring again—warning me against complacency . . . warning me against America.” Thus, for Blum, who barely speaks a word of Hebrew, reading Netanyahu becomes an encounter with his own past, long repressed in the effort to gain recognition from the American mainstream.

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The application also takes on a political dimension when Blum, completely overwhelmed, receives warm letters of recommendation in favor of Netanyahu from religious Zionist institutions, but also dire warnings from Israel (then governed by socialists), accusing the historian of right-wing propaganda in the style of the Nazis and links to terrorism. It turns out that Netanyahu has been completely expelled from the left-dominated Israeli academia; moreover, he is said to be striving to continue the work of his mentor Vladimir Jabotinsky, the founder of right-wing Zionism, by any means necessary, and to be not a researcher but rather a far-right activist. Blum, who has never had anything to do with Zionism, is forced to read up and is ultimately haunted by Kafkaesque nightmares about Jabotinsky with “Hitlerite hair, topped with a tasseled mortarboard,” occupying Blum’s college desk, confronting his teenage daughter for her Jewish self-hatred, and flirting with her to boot.

Finally, the scholar, the cause of these nightmares, arrives himself, bringing with him his three noisy, energetic boys, Jonathan, Benjamin, and Iddo, as well as his wife, the decidedly straightforward Yiddish Mamme Tzila with her “bitch strength” (as Blum’s wife calls it). The scholar immediately wants to convert Blum to Zionism, drumming into him that his life in America is “rich in possessions, but poor in spirit, petty and forgettable” and that he gave away his birthright “for a bowl of plastic lentils.” In general, Netanyahu strings together one reactionary sentence after another. On top of that, Tzila demands that the Blum family, apparently assuming inner-Jewish solidarity, take them all into their home—which our completely taken aback, ever-striving-to-keep-his-distance Blum finds rude. At the college, Netanyahu mocks the liberalism there, mocks the Bible studies professor who doesn’t speak Hebrew, rants about the historical-critical method that destroys any kind of sincere religiosity, and finally calls Blum a “court Jew.” Naturally, the whole thing ends in a catastrophe; at last, Blum catches his daughter having sex with Netanyahu’s eldest son, who apparently managed to seduce her without much effort. The Netanyahus leave in a hurry, and when the blond sheriff rushing over asks who these people are, our narrator flatly replies that they were just a “bunch of crazy Turks,” so as not to be associated with them.

The historical Benzion Netanyahu was indeed a historian and disciple of Jabotinsky; his wife’s real name was Tzila, and the names of his sons are also correctly recorded. However, one cannot help but get the impression that this is a story invented for profane political purposes, mixed with isolated historical facts; especially since the author Cohen, as evidenced by the afterword in which he laments Israeli “state terror” against the so-called Palestinians and lashes out at both Donald Trump and Bibi Netanyahu, sides with the Diaspora and thus with the schlemiel.

But as so often happens, in this case, too, the work itself is wiser than its creator. For the character of Ruben Blum, despite all the sympathy the author has for him (and which he also inculcates in the reader by sympathy guidance), is nothing more than a Jewish self-loather who is embarrassed by his own Jewishness and therefore seeks to escape it. He is anxious, unmanly, and incapable of even leading an intact family. In contrast, the character of Benzion Netanyahu, despite the author’s dislike of him and his rudeness, is nevertheless a real man, unwavering, capable of defying even the most determined sociopolitical resistance, where Blum, struggling for recognition, would have long since capitulated.

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Cohen’s attempt to defame this assertiveness is bound to fail. For vitalist, anti-epistemological thinking is by no means an oxymoron; on the contrary, it always arises from an excess of knowledge, from a weariness and insight into the inadequacy of the pure reason—just as, according to Nietzsche or Thomas Mann, one must first have experienced decadence oneself in order to become its chronicler and analyst. Vladimir Jabotinsky, a polyglot intellectual from an upper-middle-class, assimilated family, “born with two left hands,” also overcame himself and ultimately prepared for the fight for his own state. In his Odessa decadence novel, The Five (1936), he wrote: “Only through decay does one arrive at restoration. Decay is thus something like the fog at the birth of the sun.”

And thus, the circle closes. Benzion Netanyahu, Jabotinsky’s disciple, embodied this fact himself. American Jews like Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, and Joseph Epstein were aware of it as well. The liberal Joshua Cohen, on the other hand, tries his best to deny it by caricaturing Zionism, the Jewish right, as inartistic, unintellectual, and unscientific. Yet even he had to implicitly admit in his novel, despite all his efforts to condemn the Netanyahu family—and, in this case, the entire type of the Muscle Jew—that Benzion Netanyahu was a genius; for he was creatively active—something that cannot be said of his counterpart, the completely reproductive assimilator Blum, who constantly fears for his reputation among non-Jews. Hence, presumably unintentionally, this novel provides an answer to the question of why the Muscle Jews, not the schlemiels, prevailed within Judaism.

Topics: Israel Initiative • Reflections & Dialogues

Artur Abramovych is a Berlin-based writer and a political advisor in the German Bundestag. His most recent book is Ahasvers Heimkehr: Lehren aus der Diaspora. The text translated here first appeared in Tichys Einblick in August 2025.

Universities in Western liberal democracies are often described as polarized, politicized, or bureaucratically overextended. These descriptions capture aspects of contemporary academic life, but they fail to identify the more consequential transformation now underway. What has changed is not only what universities believe, whom they protect, or which values they publicly affirm. What has changed is how they understand the nature of institutional authority itself, and more specifically the role of judgment within it.

In the wake of October 7 and the conflicts that followed on many campuses—protests, counter-protests, confrontations, reports of intimidation—administrative responses in North American and European universities began to converge into a familiar script. Statements condemned “all forms of hate,” reaffirmed commitments to inclusion and open dialogue, and announced reviews of policy and procedure, while often declining to specify what had occurred or how it should be interpreted. The incident was acknowledged, but its meaning was suspended.

What is striking in this script is that it does not only defer judgment; it disciplines affect. Neutrality becomes an affective filter: grief, anger, fear, and moral urgency are treated as institutional liabilities, to be cooled into “balance” and “process.” The implied norm is not simply “do not decide,” but “do not feel too sharply.” In this way, procedural authority stabilizes conflict by emptying it of the very responses through which moral meaning first becomes visible.

What is at issue is not a contingent malfunction of otherwise healthy institutions, but a structural transformation internal to liberal authority itself. Liberal institutions have increasingly organized themselves around the promise that moral conflict can be governed without judgment, resolved without interpretation, administered without authorship, managed without responsibility, and justified without accountability. The contemporary university offers a particularly revealing site for this transformation, not because it is uniquely compromised but because it continues to claim moral and intellectual authority even as it reorganizes itself around the systematic displacement of moral decision.

Over the past decade, universities have reorganized their authority around a governing imperative that increasingly defines their institutional behavior: the avoidance of judgment. Where judgment was once exercised episodically, at moments of conflict requiring interpretation, decision, and justification, it has been displaced by continuous ethical governance. Authority no longer appears as something assumed in response to specific disputes. It has become permanent, anticipatory, and procedural. Governance is no longer activated by exceptional cases. It has become the background condition of institutional life.

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Universities today speak incessantly in the vocabulary of ethics. Values are articulated, harms are named, responsibilities are affirmed, and commitments are reiterated across mission statements, policy documents, training regimes, and public communications. Moral concern saturates institutional self-presentation. Yet precisely as ethical language proliferates, the institutional capacity to judge erodes.

The reason is structural rather than attitudinal. Authority is no longer secured through the assumption of responsibility for moral decisions, however contestable or fallible those decisions may be. Instead, legitimacy is increasingly grounded in demonstrable adherence to procedure. Institutions authorize themselves not by deciding rightly, but by showing that they have processed correctly.

This shift matters because judgment is not an optional feature of institutional authority. It is the mechanism through which authority becomes accountable. When institutions lose the capacity to judge, they do not lose power. Universities continue to regulate conduct, allocate resources, discipline members, and shape public discourse. What they lose is authorship. Governance persists, but responsibility for meaning dissolves. What remains is authority that can act without fully acknowledging what it has decided or why.

Judgment and the Structure of Authority

In its classical institutional sense, judgment is neither discretionary whim nor arbitrary power. It names a capacity to interpret situations as morally meaningful in contexts where rule application alone is insufficient. Judgment becomes necessary precisely where categories blur, where harm and offense overlap, where speech becomes action, where historical asymmetries shape present vulnerability, and where consequences cannot be inferred mechanically from intent or precedent.

Judgment binds authority to responsibility because it requires institutions to say not only how a situation will be handled but what it signifies. It converts uncertainty into a publicly accountable determination. To judge is not simply to apply a standard, but to articulate the meaning of a situation and to accept responsibility for that articulation. In this sense, judgment is inseparable from authorship. An institution that judges acknowledges itself as the author of its decisions rather than the mere executor of process.

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Authorship matters because it locates responsibility. Institutions that judge accept that their decisions can be questioned, criticized, and held to account. Authorship does not guarantee correctness. Institutions can judge in good faith and still judge wrongly. Without authorship, authority becomes opaque. Decisions occur, but responsibility cannot be meaningfully assigned.

Judgment is therefore intrinsically risky. It exposes institutions to disagreement, backlash, liability, and retrospective condemnation. It binds authority to fallibility. Yet this exposure is not a defect. It is the condition under which authority remains answerable. Authority that cannot risk error cannot meaningfully assume responsibility. Where judgment disappears, authority does not vanish. It becomes insulated, proceduralized, and detached from the moral burden of interpretation.

The contemporary aversion to judgment is not groundless. Institutions have learned, often painfully, that judgment can misfire, exclude, entrench power, and legitimate harm. Historical memory weighs heavily here. Judgment has been used to silence dissent, to naturalize hierarchy, and to justify violence in the language of moral necessity. Liberal institutions did not invent proceduralism arbitrarily; they developed it in response to the dangers of discretionary authority exercised without constraint.

It is also worth asking whether the procedural university is best understood as one local expression of a broader modern trajectory: the rationalization of authority. In Weber’s terms, legitimacy migrates from substantive judgment to formally defensible procedure—an evolution amplified by a litigious environment in which institutions learn to treat “due process” as safer than “good judgment.”

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The problem is not that this fear is unwarranted, but that it has hardened into an institutional reflex that treats all judgment as suspect and all interpretation as exposure. In seeking to protect themselves from the historical risks of judgment, institutions have displaced the responsibility of judgment altogether. The avoidance of error has come to stand in for the assumption of responsibility. Recovering judgment does not mean restoring older forms of discretionary authority but reclaiming authorship under conditions where institutional power can no longer pretend to be neutral.

Procedures are indispensable to institutional life. They constrain arbitrariness, enable coordination, and protect against bias. But procedures govern how decisions are made. Judgment concerns whether institutions recognize those decisions as moral acts for which justification must be borne, defended, and, if necessary, revised. When procedures cease to support judgment and instead replace it, authority persists without accountability, and responsibility becomes diffuse.

Risk Avoidance and the Reorganization of Governance

What has changed in contemporary universities is not that decisions are no longer made. Sanctions are imposed, norms are enforced, resources are allocated, affiliations are regulated, and lives are materially shaped. What has changed is that institutions increasingly refuse to recognize these actions as judgments. This refusal reflects a structural recalibration of how institutional risk is understood and managed. Judgment is costly because it produces visible authorship. It ties an institution to determinations that can be contested and condemned. Procedure disperses responsibility. Decisions can be attributed to frameworks, compliance obligations, or regulatory necessity rather than to institutional interpretation. Under conditions of heightened scrutiny, reputational vulnerability, and legal exposure, this dispersion becomes attractive.

By the mid-2010s, universities were already undergoing a quiet reconfiguration. Governance increasingly took juridical form. Long-standing orientations toward compliance and risk management intensified, particularly in the United States after the 2011 Dear Colleague Letter expanded Title IX enforcement. Though framed as procedural guidance, its effects only became visible over time, as authority migrated from faculty judgment to administrative process. Comparable dynamics appeared elsewhere through liability regimes, audits, insurance requirements, and regulatory harmonization. Across these domains, episodic faculty judgment was gradually displaced by standing administrative oversight.

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At the same time, institutional life became explicitly moralized. Universities increasingly presented themselves not simply as sites of debate but as ethical actors with standing commitments. The expansion of DEI infrastructures, conduct codes governing speech and identity, and proliferating value statements produced a condition of moral saturation.

These developments unfolded amid sustained political polarization and growing legitimacy anxiety. Universities came to function as symbolic battlegrounds in broader cultural conflicts, where decisions once resolved internally now carried reputational, legal, and geopolitical consequences. Judgment became costly not because of the risk of error, but because it entailed visible authorship. Platformization intensified this pressure by collapsing the boundary between internal deliberation and public exposure. Under such conditions, procedural neutrality appeared safer than decision: frameworks could be cited, processes invoked, and responsibility deferred.

The COVID years accelerated and consolidated this transformation in ways that permanently altered institutional habits of authority. Under conditions of declared emergency, universities normalized rule by exception, displaced deliberation with protocol, and reorganized decision-making around technical guidance rather than interpretive judgment. Decisions of extraordinary consequence were framed as matters of compliance with external expertise, public health mandates, or evolving models, thereby further distancing authority from authorship.

What appeared at the time as an extraordinary suspension of ordinary governance trained institutions in a mode of action oriented toward insulation rather than responsibility. When the immediate emergency receded, the governing reflexes it produced remained. Universities emerged from the pandemic more comfortable exercising extensive control without assuming interpretive responsibility, more practiced in deferring justification to procedure, and more habituated to continuous governance that no longer pauses at the moment when judgment would once have been expected.

This transformation also altered the internal distribution of authority. Judgment migrated away from disciplinary communities toward compliance offices, legal counsel, and risk managers. Decisions were increasingly shaped by anticipatory calculations of defensibility rather than by engagement with contested meaning. The university’s capacity for internal moral deliberation gave way to a managerial orientation focused on insulation.

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Moral Saturation and the Performance of Legitimacy

As judgment receded, ethical language proliferated, and values statements produced a condition of moral saturation. Ethics ceased to be something institutions confronted selectively and became something they performed continuously. Moral vocabulary standardized and routinized. Rather than sharpening moral evaluation, ethical discourse increasingly functioned as a signaling mechanism. It demonstrated alignment with recognized frameworks while avoiding the burden of interpretation. Ethical language remained omnipresent even as moral judgment became elusive.

To judge is to be seen judging. To decide is to be seen deciding. Procedural neutrality appears safer not because it resolves conflict, but because it diffuses responsibility. Institutions learn to survive controversy not by persuading but by demonstrating compliance. Ethical language shifts from deliberation to performance. Values are affirmed but rarely interpreted. Harms are named but seldom weighed. Responsibility is invoked but rarely assumed.

Procedure as Moral Technology

Procedure under these conditions is not neutral. It functions as a moral technology that stabilizes conflict while shielding institutions from exposure to responsibility. Instead of asking what a situation demands, institutions increasingly ask which framework governs it. Once conflict is routed through that apparatus, harm becomes a fileable object, urgency is moderated into proportionality, responsibility is redistributed across context, agency is diffused across process, intention is bracketed as extraneous, and consequence becomes only retrospectively legible. Institutions act continuously and speak fluently in ethical grammar, yet they become less able to secure recognition for what they do. Decisions still occur, but their meaning remains unresolved. Action proceeds without interpretation, and enforcement without justification.

Governance without judgment does not produce restraint; it produces severity. When institutions no longer recognize themselves as judging agents, they no longer experience enforcement as something that must be justified, defended, or owned. Sanctions become procedural outcomes rather than moral acts, and their force increases precisely because their meaning is no longer at issue. Power exercised without authorship tends to harden rather than soften, since it is no longer tempered by the need for recognition.

Classical social and political theory anticipated this development with striking clarity, though from very different horizons. Weber traced how formal rationality expands technical control while draining institutions of substantive meaning. Arendt showed that when judgment is displaced by rule-following, the result is not moral security but moral vacancy. Later critiques, from MacIntyre’s account of managerial morality to Foucault’s analysis of governmentality, made visible how ethical life itself could be reorganized into an apparatus of administration. What we are witnessing in contemporary universities is not the erosion of ethical concern but its institutional capture: ethics transformed from a faculty of judgment into an infrastructure of governance.

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Time, Deferral, and the Evasion of Decision

Judgment is not only a moral capacity; it is a temporal one. To judge is to act at the moment when decision can no longer be deferred. It binds an institution to a time, fixing responsibility rather than dispersing it. Governance, by contrast, is temporally elastic. Processes can be extended, reviews reopened, frameworks revised. Institutions act continuously, but rarely conclusively.

This reorganization of time has profound consequences. Ethical failure does not disappear. It becomes structurally illegible. When responsibility is endlessly deferred, accountability dissolves. Institutions survive controversy by staying in motion, avoiding the moments where judgment would require them to stop and commit.

Antisemitism as a Diagnostic Case

Certain forms of harm expose these dynamics with particular clarity. Antisemitism occupies this position in the contemporary university not because it is morally exceptional, but because it resists the classificatory logics of proceduralized ethics. Antisemitic harm does not map cleanly onto symmetrical frameworks of power and vulnerability. Jews appear as neither unequivocally powerless nor securely powerful. Antisemitism operates through historical sedimentation, symbolic inversion, and moral projection.

Recognizing antisemitism in concrete situations requires distinctions that cannot be generated by balance without distortion or by procedure without erasure. It requires judgment. Universities routinely affirm opposition to antisemitism in abstract terms. The difficulty arises at the point of application, where asymmetry demands interpretation rather than symmetry.

The post–October 7 campus crisis exposed this dynamic with unusual clarity. Institutional responses were extensive and continuous, yet marked by procedural deferral. Condemnation was issued while responsibility was redistributed. Fear was acknowledged while relativized. Dialogue substituted for decision. The result was not inaction, but action that never quite reached the status of judgment.

Severity without Recognition

One consequence of governance without judgment is not leniency, but severity. When institutions no longer understand themselves as judging agents, enforcement becomes detached from recognition. Sanctions are imposed without persuasion. Decisions are executed without explanation. Authority no longer seeks acknowledgment because it no longer understands itself as interpreting meaning.

Detached from responsibility, enforcement becomes opaque and selective. Severity emerges not from conviction, but from insulation. Institutions act decisively where alignment with dominant narratives or minimal reputational exposure makes action safe, while withholding judgment precisely where asymmetry would require it. Judgment does not disappear. It degenerates into enforcement that no longer seeks recognition.

The Hollowing of Authority

When institutions lose the capacity to judge, they do not lose power. Universities remain powerful organizations. What they lose is authority in the classical sense: the capacity to command recognition as a meaningful arbiter of norms and limits. Conflict is managed rather than resolved. Ethical language persists but refers increasingly to procedures followed rather than determinations made. Responsibility becomes difficult to locate. Decisions proliferate while authorship evaporates.

What has emerged is not a temporary distortion of institutional authority, but a form of governance that can no longer recognize its own decisions as moral acts. Liberal institutions were built on the premise that authority could be exercised without domination because it remained accountable through judgment. When judgment is displaced by procedure, that premise collapses from within. What remains is not neutrality and pluralism, but power without authorship and administration without responsibility. An order that governs moral conflict while refusing moral decision does not only fail in particular cases. It forfeits the very grounds on which its authority once claimed legitimacy.

Topics: Israel Initiative • Reflections & Dialogues

Eliyahu V. Sapir is a political scientist at Maastricht University. His recent work focuses on antisemitism in higher education, documenting the experiences of Jewish and Israeli students and faculty and analyzing institutional responses to antisemitic harm. He co-authored the 2024 report Unsafe Spaces: The Rise of Anti-Semitism in the Dutch Academic World and the 2025 book Het 7 oktober-effect, and regularly contributes to public debate on these issues through op-eds in Dutch media.

Introduction

The “Free Palestine” movement and its fellow travelers seem to have issued a contemporary Western world smitten by “moral exhibitionism” a license to kill Jews.1 Indeed, when in the midst of a brutal war a claim gets made that one party, Israel, is committing a genocide of the Palestinian people—even as making such a determination and its converse are often tendentious, emotive in the fog of battle2—the result is nothing short of a death warrant that makes the murder of Jews morally licit, refurbishing (Nazi Germany-style) the kind of medieval blood libels that in the twentieth century brought about the Holocaust and the destruction of European Jewry.

“Why did the Holocaust take place?” asked rhetorically a Palestinian Fatah official on Egyptian television in February 2024.3 Exuding the kind of classic antisemitic prejudice so charming in its untaintedness, his answer was as predictable as it was simple: “Why? Because Jews and World Zionism were planning the takeover of Germany, and they had begun decaying [the place] economically . . . which instigated Hitler’s reaction.”4 So in this mindset, Hitler was an average guy simply reacting to an insidious Jewish cabal, and in that sense he was as justified in mass-murdering unarmed Jews as were Hamas’s “razzia pogromists”5 of October 7, 2023.

This article examines some of the cultural and intellectual bearings that lend legitimacy to this kind of thinking, and to the “Free Palestine” phenomenon in particular, which advances hoaxes and stereotypes that feed a modern, restituted, “righteous” form of antisemitism. Exploring these sorts of temperaments by examining historical and journalistic chronicles, political texts, and Palestinianist historiography and popular attitudes, this article also reflects on a Western world’s post-October 7 cultural, intellectual, and academic preoccupations—the “Global North’s” modern challenges, as it were, an area that has become the breeding ground of an acceptable, non-controversial antisemitism, in many quarters validating a righteous “right to kill Jews.” Using the phrase “Global North” in the meaning given it by Gilles Kepel, the West seems to have been assigned to a space painted as irremediably colonialist, racist, and slave-holding, a West that is an eternally guilty practitioner of apartheid and other ills of human history. It is a “Global North” that is summoned to self-recriminate, self-hate, and self-abnegate, and that must be replaced by a rising—once subjugated but now liberated—beatific “Global South” that ostensibly never colonized and never brutalized, and which is otherwise a carrier of noble human values and humanistic truths that the West ought to espouse.6

Moral Exhibitionism and the Right to Kill Jews

In a climate of intellectual nihilism and hemiplegic morality of this sort, which presumes that colonialism is an exclusively Western (Judeo-Christian) ill, holding Islam (the other colonialism) blameless, the “Free Palestine” current has germinated and emerged triumphant, coming to dominate prominent contemporary Western public, media, and intellectual spheres, particularly university campuses. “Our higher education system is severely battered,” wrote Gabriel Noah Brahm in his inaugural text introducing a new Telos series focused on higher education.7 In his telling, universities have become places where “[o]pen support for the violently anti-Jewish, misogynist, homophobic Hamas terrorist organization . . . is one sure sign that long-standing problems, rooted in both curriculum and administrative policy, have reached a turning point.”8 Incidentally, little significant campus agitation has been noted in the Middle East proper, or in the Muslim world, where one would have expected to see more virulent anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian sympathies on display. Thus, the “Free Palestine” movement seems to have remained at its core a Western “liberal” phenomenon that continues to gain followers, command influence, and captivate growing audiences who at times are all too willing to translate arguably justified support for a Palestinian cause into calls for the “destruction of the American empire,” the “eradica[tion of] America as we know it,” and “the total collapse of the university structure and American empire itself”9—all of this correlating with violent antisemitic attacks no less unbridled in their malignancy than the October 7 pogroms themselves.

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In the United States alone, the Anti-Defamation League estimated that antisemitic acts increased by more than 350 percent barely three months after October 7, 2023.10 In the three months preceding this writing, the consequences of this unrestrained anti-Jewish rage have translated into criminal deeds no longer daunted by their criminality—indeed, proud of the crimes’ “Free Palestine” impulses. These incidents include the Passover 2025 arson of Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro’s residence, with “the people of Palestine” reportedly uppermost in the perpetrator’s mind; a June 2025 firebombing of Jewish demonstrators in Boulder, Colorado, with the attacker allegedly shouting “Free Palestine” as he threw incendiary devices at peaceful marchers; and finally, the May 2025 murder of two Israeli embassy staffers in Washington, DC, with the perpetrator, again, allegedly doing the deed “for Free Palestine.” Indeed, “Free Palestine” seems to have morphed into a fashionable “vigilante league,” affiliated with multifaceted “intersectional”11 Global South movements, ostensibly righteous benevolent beatific “Davids” facing cruel “colonialist, racist, Islamophobic” Global North “Goliaths,”12 seeking the liberation of the Palestinian people from Israeli occupation and the establishment of a Palestinian state, all by means of intimidating, harassing, terrorizing, and, when the opportunity affords itself, murdering Jews.

Yet, at its core, “Free Palestine” remains “Palestinianist”13 rather than “Palestinian” per se, international in its scope, anti-Jewish (not to say outright antisemitic) in its sentiments, and a throwback to Soviet-style “national liberation movements” aiming for destruction rather than building—in this case, the destruction of the world’s sole Jewish state on the debris of which a Palestinian democracy would emerge.14 Indeed, the former Soviet Union is believed to have molded what became “the ideological, diplomatic and military backbone” of the Palestine Liberation Organization of yore—for all intents and purposes, a precursor and lodestar of today’s “Free Palestine” movement. The ultimate aim, as articulated in the 1968 PLO Charter and revisited in a 1980 Fatah political platform, is

[t]he liberation of Palestine, a full and complete liberation; the annihilation of the Zionist entity in all of its economic, political, military and cultural manifestations . . . and the establishment of an independent democratic Palestine which would rule the entire land of Palestine.15

Following the 1993 Oslo Agreement, which had committed both Palestinians and Israelis to an “end of conflict” phase, paving the way to eventually putting in place a “two-state solution,” the Palestinian National Council voted in 1996 to nullify the PLO Charter’s clauses calling for the “dismantlement of the Zionist entity.” Yet it remains unclear whether the language in question was amended or removed, given that a two-thirds-majority vote was required to approve an amendment, and that based on the April 1996 voting results, it does not appear that this two-thirds threshold was reached.16 Nevertheless, the impulse of Palestinians and friends to do away with the State of Israel seems to have remained, and as October 7 and its aftermath indicate, the “Free Palestine” movement appears to be carrying the PLO’s old mantle. As Bret Stephens noted in an April 2024 New York Times opinion piece, the “Free Palestine” movement makes no bones about its

calls to get rid of the Jewish state in its entirety (“from the river to the sea . . . ”), its open celebration of the murder of [the Jewish state’s] people (“resistance is justified . . . ”) and its efforts to mock, minimize or deny the suffering of Israelis, which so quickly descend into the antisemitism on naked display.17

In other words, at play is an uninhibited unapologetic antisemitism that depicts Jews as colonizing usurpers of Arab lands, latter-day Nazis committing a genocide of the Palestinian people while feigning victimhood—“false victimhood” being a classic antisemitic trope of the devious Jew, who is otherwise always a manipulator, never a victim. This skilled semantic and factual perversion, turning the Jewish narrative on its head, morphing the liberated, redeemed, post-Shoah Jew into an executioner, was predicted in 1967 (the year is not accidental) by French Philosopher Vladimir Jankélévitch (1903–1985), who prophesied a coming “anti-Zionism” as a polite, righteous form of antisemitism—an unbelievable boon to the antisemites of yore. The antisemitism of the future will call itself anti-Zionism, wrote Jankélévitch in 1967:

it will grant us permission—indeed it will give us the right, nay the duty—to be antisemites, in the name of democracy. Simply put, anti-Zionism is antisemitism justified, democratized, made accessible, free for all. Anti-Zionism is a license to become democratically antisemitic. And should we, in the process, become able to paint the Jews themselves as Nazis, what a wonderful thing that would be!18

Thus, the “Free Palestine” slogans prevalent on Western university campuses and dominating the public arena and social media platforms appear to be in this spirit of Jankélévitch’s ominous 1960s prediction. Indeed, “Free Palestine” votaries and fellow travelers seem to be bequeathing a modern world smitten by what Céline Pina termed “moral exhibitionism,” a free license to “murder Jews.”19 Pina notes that when unencumbered by knowledge, when freed of the reckoning of history, when discharged of the responsibility and meaning that words carry, one can claim unrestrainedly that

Jews are committing a genocide, even as there are no genocides being perpetrated. In this way, one would in effect be issuing a license rendering the murder of Jews licit . . . especially in a world of ostentations, histrionics, and pretense, where “moral exhibitionism” replaces morality. When in the Middle Ages Jews were depicted as Christ-killers, when the uncouth of times bygone are convinced that Jews murder Christian children to collect the ritual blood required in the preparation of Passover matza, the killing of those Jewish child-killers becomes a virtue. It is precisely those blood libels of times past that got rehabilitated by Nazis, justifying their twentieth-century industrial-grade mass-murder of Jews.20

Thus, a new, troubling historical and semantic manipulation is being introduced into the political and cultural narratives dealing with Israel and the Jews, one that renders the Islamist aggressor as the victim, justifying his anti-Jewish hostility—in other words his antisemitism—with putative Jewish “crimes against humanity.”21 This in effect becomes a “mitigating diversion,” writes Jean Szlamowicz, one that spawns a new kind of morality rendering Jew-hatred and the vilification of the Jew not only acceptable but indeed righteous.22 Yet this is an ancient “scam” given a new lease on life, a scam that seeks to paint the Jew as a diabolical destructive beast, and in turn justify dispossessing him of his ancestral history and memory in the ancestral land of his birth. In this way Jews get tarnished,

banished from their lands; they get persecuted since Roman times; they get subsequently conquered and subjugated by Umayyad, Abbasid, Seljuk, Crusader, and Ottoman occupations; they get further harassed and attacked since 1948. . . . Yet it is they, the Jews, who are the accursed, accused of occupation, an accusation tantamount to a revisionist expropriation of Jewish history.23

That is how speaking about the Hamas–Israel war—indeed discussing the Arab–Israeli conflict as a whole and in any context—gets mired in what Georges Bensoussan termed “the emotional plague,” a fickle sentiment opening the floodgates of passion, disregarding logic, reason, and fact.24 Reading history through the prism of the “emotional plague,” notes Bensoussan, makes one indifferent to sober, evidence-based historical inquiry, privileging feelings over fact and prejudice over judiciousness.25 That is how 500,000 dead in Syria’s brutal war, the persecution of Muslim Uighurs in China, and the Muslim Rohingya in Burma fail to generate passions, riots, protests, and university campus unrest similar to those provoked by the Hamas–Israel war since October 2023.26

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The deaths of Muslims and Arabs around the world seem to be of little to no interest unless Jews are involved. In other words, it matters little who the victim may be. It matters more that the victimizer—or perceived victimizer—be a Jew, or better yet, a perp (or perceived perp) assumed to be a member of the dominant white heterosexual colonial Christian patriarchal phallocentric order, of which the Jews, and Israel, are naturally prime representatives. As Brahm notes, a new righteousness is being deployed whereby the Jews are not only “‘white’ (a term used on campus to mean ‘structurally racist’) but ‘hyper-white’ (the whitest, therefore most racist of all).”27

In sum, “remove the Jew from this brew,” the moral exhibitionists seem to be suggesting, “and watch order return to world disorder.” Those are almost verbatim the words that Palestinian national poet Mahmoud Darwish (1941–2008) relayed to a Jewish interlocutor in a landmark 1997 interview. Speaking with Israeli poet Helit Yeshurun, Darwish famously asked her:

Do you know why us Palestinians are so widely known around the world? Because you [the Jews] are our adversaries. The interest in the Palestinian question is a function of the world’s interest in the Jewish question. Yes. The world’s main interest is you, not me! Had we been at war with Pakistan, no one would have ever heard of me.28

To this axiom is added the prevalent belief, an “emotional plague,” that Israel is an illegitimate Western colonial creation,29 that indigeneity in the Near and Middle East belongs exclusively to Arabs and Muslims, and that a putative Arab Muslim invasion, colonization, and occupation of a supposedly pre-Islamic Near and Middle East is somehow a manipulation of historical facts, a travesty of the reality that the Near and Middle East had always been Arab and Muslim.30

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Lebanese-American essayist and statistician Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who since October 7, 2023, appears to have moved away from his earlier indictments of what he once termed “bigoteering,” seems to have put his finger on some of the earlier iterations of the “scam” that Pena, Szlamowicz, and Bensoussan have in turn likened to “moral exhibitionism” and “emotional plague.” In an online essay titled “Pedophrasty, Bigoteering, and Other Modern Scams,” Taleb defined “bigoteering” as the impulse to tar

someone (or someone’s opinions) as “racist,” “chauvinist” or somethinglikeit-ist in situations where these [accusations] are not warranted. This is a shoddy manipulation to exploit the stigmas accompanying such labels and force the opponent to spent [sic] time and energy explaining “why he/she is not a bigot.”31

In this same vein, Taleb defined “pedophrasty” as an

argument involving children to prop up a rationalization and make the opponent look like an asshole, as people are defenseless and suspend all skepticism in front of suffering children: nobody has the heart to question the authenticity or source of the reporting. Often done with the aid of pictures. . . . Pedophrasty has its most effects on actors, journalists and similar types who are intellectually insecure, deprived of critical judgment, and afraid of being classified as violators of some norm of political correctness.32

But as Taleb suggested in 2018, the damage has been done. Blood libels involving children are difficult to wash away. And although very easily debunked in a rational world, we seem to have long since exited that world. Indeed, writes French philosopher Michel Onfray, “we have officially entered the post-truth era,” an emotive irrational kind of learnedness “where there are no truths except the one that says ‘there are no truths.’”33 Conversely, we have inaugurated a universe where all that matters is staking claims, taking positions, digging in one’s heels, shouting down opponents, muzzling them, canceling them, “hating on them” (to use a Woke-chic turn of phrase), and assaulting them, because what matters in our post-reason universe is not facts that our opponents may be adducing but the fact that we don’t like the facts they are adducing.34 Therefore, claiming Israel is resurrecting medieval Jewish blood rituals (the kind of canard that led to the Holocaust and the destruction of European Jewry) seems like a “neat trick.” It is also an image not easily erased in a modern age consumed by “mood swings” and “social media clicks.” Bigoteering and pedophrasty thus become effective forms of “moral exhibitionism” possessed of a remarkable staying power, auguring frightening consequences.

Conclusion: Moral, Semantic, Factual Confusion

An adage attributed to seventeenth-century French prelate and statesman Cardinal de Richelieu (1585–1642) suggests that politics is the art of making the necessary, or rather the desirable, possible. In the case of the Hamas–Israel conflict, alea jacta est! The die is cast! The desire, in some quarters the necessity, of stigmatizing the Jew as a Christ-killer—and all else that issues from that stereotype, e.g., the Jew as murderer of Palestinian children, bloodthirsty genocidal colonizer, usurper of Arab lands, etc.—has been made possible. Never mind that the historical consensus recognizes Christ as a Jewish rabbi who lived among and preached to Jews in Roman Judea, not Palestine;35 in his modern (“Free Palestine”) incarnation, Jesus remains an ancestor and symbol of Palestinian Arabs, his self-sacrifice an iteration of the Palestinian struggle.

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But this proceeds from an old, proud historical—or rather mythological—pedigree: a denialist Palestinianism sitting on Islamist foundations,36 aiming to expropriate, in order to deny, Jewish historicity. In 1983, addressing an adoring press corps at the UN in Geneva, Yasser Arafat proudly noted:

We [the Palestinians] were under Roman imperialism. We sent a Palestinian fisherman, called St. Peter, to Rome; he not only occupied Rome, but also won the hearts of the people. We know how to resist imperialism and occupation. Jesus Christ was the first Palestinian fedayeen who carried his sword along the path on which the Palestinians today carry their cross.37

Thus, in 1983 and since, not only would Jesus be dispossessed of his Jewishness, without so much as a whimpering pushback from those who otherwise ought to “know better,” but the “Free Palestine” movement in more recent times would follow suit—and then some. Some may recall the iconography of early iterations of campus unrest across American and European universities, namely, anti-Israel demonstrations coinciding with the 2023 Christmas season, brandishing placards depicting in turn a baby Jesus, alongside a crucified image of him with the grieving Madonna at his feet, both clad in some representation of Arafat’s trademark keffiyeh. This imagery would be further enhanced with not so subtle antisemitic and anti-Israel slogans, often written in Fraktur font reminiscent of Nazi iconography.38 Thus, the long—arguably three-millennia-long—history of antisemitism, with its impressive linguistic and semantic foundations, would find new fertile ground in the enlightened West, in the Western academy no less, mere days following October 7, 2023. In this long history, there have been ancient Egyptian, Babylonian, and Roman antisemitisms, followed by a Christian antisemitism and an antisemitism of the Age of Enlightenment, leading us to the antisemitism of the socialist—that of the Jew as greedy capitalist—all the way to the antisemitism of the nationalist—that of the Jew as a rootless cosmopolitan.39 Today, we have a resurgence of “scientific genetic” antisemitism, where crackpot (mainly Middle Eastern) “geneticists” seem ready to begin measuring bone density, skull shapes, skin tone, and eye color in order to deny Jewish history in the Middle East and assign “Jewish indigeneity” to the Palestinians.40 “We, the Arabs, are the real Semites, not the Jews,” proudly declared a Fatah official on Egyptian Television in February 2024.41

Those are essentially the historiographic bearings of the “Free Palestine” movement, which not only argues that Jews are usurpers of Palestinian lands, but that the Palestinians are in fact the “real Jews,” who are currently being ethnically cleansed by allogenic Israelis. These moral, semantic, and historical inversions ought not stand the test of honest historical scrutiny, but they still persist all the same. And so, while the Jews are denied their claimed authenticity as Jews, the classic anti-Jewish caricatures and the antisemitic cabal ascribed to them remain. With this is brought back into circulation the old antisemitic caricature of the Jew as deicide (killer of Jesus), as bloodthirsty predator, casting acceptability on a classic antisemitic canard, whipping the “moral exhibitionists” of our times into the hysteria of consenting to the righteousness (nay, the moral duty) of removing Israel from existence in order to wash away the depravity of its presence. Remove Israel, we are told by the “Free Palestine” crowd, and watch the reign of peace descend on the universe. Never mind that one would be hard pressed meeting a non-Jewish parallel in this kind of reasoning—say, removing Russia, Iran, or Myanmar from existence in order for peace on earth to prevail.42

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Yet this is the dominant “morality” of our times: a modern totalitarianism under a different guise, an Orwellian extortionist system whereby those who dissent are tarred with bigotry, racism, chauvinism, Islamophobia, or “somethinglikeit-ist,” to use Taleb’s neologism.43 Indeed, being stigmatized in this way gets one affiliated with the white heterosexual Christian patriarchal phallocentric world order, one that dares assign sex at birth (the latter being a form of violence). Belonging in this group is tantamount to social and professional death, so it is better for one to comply than to die. Totalitarianism is indeed a collective reeducation camp, where domestication (or rather “breaking” in the equestrian sense of the term) is at play, abominating an “existing order as corrupt and immoral” and presenting society with an ostensibly better, more virtuous alternative.44

Acquiescing in this new extortionism, wrote French philosopher and public intellectual Renée Fregosi, is an illustration of the “self-hate” gripping Western societies, the outcome of a Western kind of “psychological despair” spawned by the West’s proclivity for self-criticism (not a vice), taking stock of its colonialist past, and self-castigating for its present economic, cultural, and technological supremacy. All this leads, in Fregosi’s estimation, to variations of self-flagellation, self-abnegation, and increasingly self-hate.45 This in turn yields the espousal of an alternate narrative: a “Global South” narrative deemed more “virtuous,” because “intersectional,” weaving Palestinianism and Islamism in its expansive folds.46

Thus, by way of skilled rhetorical inversions “indoctrinating a pre-determined, sacralized, unassailable official version of the common good,”47 the “Free Palestine” crowd rides on modern Western fetishes such as “gender fluidity . . . anti-racism . . . and anti-colonialism,”48 seeking out and recruiting non-Muslim allies, often progressives adrift in search of a new moral compass and in need of new “fashionable victims” to protect, advocate, and cry for. In this, the “new progressives”—in the main, social media fashionistas, supermodels, Hollywood heartthrobs, rock musicians, and Democratic lawmakers—become willing “voluntary dhimmis,” to use Fregosi’s coinage.49 It is in this climate that the “Free Palestine” movement, Islamist at its core, espouses anti-racist ostentations, ensconcing itself in Western liberal societies that it otherwise largely resents, denigrates, and decries, with an eye toward ultimately subverting and transforming them.50

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Chief among the culprits in this sad state of affairs may be our universities and our elite disseminators of knowledge and information. Perhaps justifiably so, and with all the good intentions in the world, they depict Palestinianism and Islamism from a Christian bias, deeming Islam and “Muslim causes” an “Arabic form of Christianity” when in fact Islam itself is ill-fitted for such a comparison.51 Indeed, Islam is not only a religion; it is also a political, judicial, and social system, a civilization and a civilizational project that is self-assured, pugnacious even, militant, conquering, colonial, and, from a Muslim worldview, righteous, immutable, inexorable, and divinely sanctioned. Bernard Lewis noted that Islam came into the world not to coexist with other religions but indeed to supersede and rule over them. He wrote that, from its inception, Islam has been

a religion of power, and in the Muslim worldview it is right and proper that power should be wielded by Muslims and Muslims alone. Others may receive the tolerance, even the benevolence, of the Muslim state, provided that they clearly recognize Muslim supremacy. That Muslims should rule over non-Muslims is right and normal. That non-Muslims should rule over Muslims is an offence against the laws of God and nature, and this is true whether in Kashmir, Palestine, Lebanon, or Cyprus.52

That may also be true in Western secular societies where Muslim demography is on the rise. That is also why Israel is an anomaly from an Islamist and Islamic perspective; and before Israel, Lebanon was the anomaly, until that anomaly was corrected, stripping Lebanon of its sovereign Christian content.53 Confronting this, and the many related challenges facing Western liberal societies today, requires epistemic clarity, knowledge, understanding, a coherent civilizational project, and the dissemination of a counternarrative of fact as an alternative to emotions, diffidence, and self-abnegation. As Georges Bensoussan notes, the Arab–Israeli conflict in general and the recent Hamas–Israel sparring and settling of scores in particular are seldom about facts and often about perceptions and feelings, where waxing hysterical always trumps waxing historical, where propaganda always drowns fact, where mythology always defies pedagogy, where sentiment is always privileged over discernment, and where vilifications always flout reason.54

Perhaps turning down the media volume and turning up dispassionate readings of evidentiary facts—and doing so outside of platitudes and victimhoods—may help. Even if one detests Zionism (as the “Free Palestine” crowds do), and even if one is unmoved by the Palestinian narratives (as the other side does), all of us (this author included) may be better served taking a break from their respective mythologies and seeking knowledge away from the excesses of “intersectionality” that would rather vituperate than debate and that often sacrifice the cause of knowledge in favor of discourses of accusations and lachrymose lamentations.

Topics: Israel Initiative

Franck Salameh is a historian and multilingual translator, biographer, memoirist, and professor of Near Eastern Studies at Boston College. He is also Editor-in-Chief of The Journal of the Middle East and Africa. His academic and public work center primarily on Levantine minorities and the history of ideas and political thought in the Modern Middle East, with a special focus on Arabism, Zionism, Islamism, as well as Francophonie and the history of France and French missionaries in the East. He has published extensively in national and international academic journals as well as in public outlets. His most recent books include The Other Middle East (Yale Univ. Press, 2017) and Lebanon’s Jewish Community (Palgrave, 2019). His current book projects include a biography of Franco-Lebanese relations that traces a millennium-long story of emotional attachments and betrayals between the Maronite Church and France. His second book-in-progress is an anthology of Arab Nationalism, updating in a way Sylvia Haim’s 1964 classic. His third book-under-construction is an intellectual biography of Lebanese-Belgian Jesuit Henri Lammens (1862–1937), one of the spiritual forefathers of modern Lebanese nationalism, and an archnemesis of Edward Said and his modern epigones, Arabists and Islamists of yore, who may very well be folded under the fashionable woke umbrella of our times.

The accusation by some international Holocaust and genocide scholars that Israel is engaged in genocide is part of a politically motivated, largely anti-Zionist campaign that traffics in historical revisionism and that features attacks on standard definitions of the Holocaust, antisemitism, and genocide itself. The intellectuals who engage in these accusations are, in their perception, progressive scholar-activists who view themselves as pro-Palestinian—their essential self-image.1 Their activism is characterized by one-sided criticism of the Israeli government’s conduct of the war in Gaza, typically described as “genocide” or, additionally, “scholasticide.”2 Notably, it rarely, if ever, includes criticism of Palestinian leadership and its political decisions, and it is characterized by uncritical use of Hamas propaganda. One might ask: why don’t these scholars—who single-mindedly criticize both Israel’s conduct in war and the right-wing government of Prime Minister Netanyahu—regard Palestinians and their leaders as morally responsible subjects of their own history? History itself might offer some perspective on the question.

The one-sided critical tendency of this circle began long before the Hamas-led massacres in Israel on October 7, 2023, and the Israeli response to them. Many Holocaust and genocide scholars who speak of a “genocide in Gaza” participated in Historikerstreit 2.0, the “Catechism Debate” initiated in 2021 by genocide scholar A. Dirk Moses. Moses is part of a small group of thinkers who seek to undermine the common view of the historically unprecedented character of the Holocaust, which was, as the Israeli Holocaust scholar Yehuda Bauer argues, unprecedented in its ideological, global, and total scale.3 In his book The Problems of Genocide, published in German in an essay collection under the title Nach dem Genozid, Moses argues that the traditional concept of genocide, in which the “intent” to destroy a particular group is central, should be replaced by a supposedly more humane standard that emphasizes the effects of violence on civilian populations. In his view, the “intent” of the killings is not of interest: “[W]hat difference does it make to civilian victims whether the violence against them is carried out with genocidal or military intentions?”4 This approach seems to weaponize humanitarian issues for a political agenda; otherwise, the argumentation applied to the war in Gaza would be more carefully considered and research on the situation and living experiences of Palestinians in Gaza would have been taken into consideration. Removing “intent” from the concept of genocide and replacing it with a supposedly more humane concept may sound well-meaning. However, in the case of Gaza, Moses and others never question the numbers provided by the Hamas authorities in Gaza, nor do they ask how many fighters were killed, how many of them were children abused as child terrorists, or whether the numbers are reliable at all. Neither Hamas nor their allies are considered responsible for the devastating situation in Gaza. Moreover, comparing Gaza to a ghetto or a Nazi-like concentration camp proves that the necessary research was never conducted.

For Moses, genocide is subordinated to his principle of “illegitimate permanent security,” a concept inspired by postcolonial theory that gives the strong impression of delegitimizing the State of Israel’s desire for security. “Permanent security” is ultimately based on the kind of protective assertions made in court by Otto Ohlendorf, SS-Gruppenführer and commander of Einsatzgruppe D. German courts already rejected this line of argumentation in the first Einsatzgruppen trial in Würzburg in 1950 because it is what it is: an exculpatory effort to distract from a murderous ideology. The circle likewise seeks to define global antisemitism as a form of racism, thus distorting its historically unique character as an ideology that unites the far right, the far left, and Islamists, while providing a common concept of an enemy that must be fought and eliminated.

Some of the proponents of this school of thought are members of the editorial board of the Journal of Genocide Research5 and founders of the Genocide and Holocaust Crisis Network, which recently went online in April 2025 and which is trying set the agenda for the future of genocide and Holocaust studies.6 The network promotes all the aforementioned redefinitions. Yet it also defines antisemitism as a form of racism; it defames—but of course—the working definition of antisemitism adopted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) and instead supports the competing Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism (JDA), which some of its proponents also helped initiate; and the network generally sets the stage for new, unempirical approaches to the rewriting of history. Most notably, in an ahistorical step, it hijacks the Nakba and defines it as a “mass atrocity” crime, without reference to the historical genesis of the term and its definition in Palestinian society.7 The aim is to squeeze Nakba into the framework of a global history of violence in which there exists only one aggressor: Israel.

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While the spiritual guides of this circle are scholars like Amos Goldberg or Bashir Basir, its dominant voice is Omer Bartov, an American-Israeli Holocaust scholar who constantly excuses October 7 as legitimate resistance, as he mischaracterized it already on October 13 in the German press, which downplays the eliminatory, antisemitic nature of the Hamas-led massacres of October 7: “The despicable attack by Hamas must be seen as an attempt to draw attention to the plight of the Palestinians.”8 At the same time, they portray the October 7 massacres as acts of Palestinian resistance or as an uprising against the occupation, while downplaying the role of antisemitism in the Hamas attacks. This is not only false but dangerous: Hamas is ideologically linked to the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood, which has networks worldwide and seeks to undermine Western societies. Its motor is pro-Palestinian activism, according to Iraqi historian Omar Mohammed. Moreover, Hamas is the fifth-richest terror organization in the world (estimated at $500 million, according to Forbes in 2022), and its leadership has repeatedly stated that it is not responsible for protecting civilians (Abu Marzouk) but fights in civilian clothing. This is also reflected in their misuse of civilian facilities as weapons depots or rocket launch sites. Even the Hamas tunnel system in Gaza City, where the remaining hostages in the Gaza Strip are presumably being held captive and which is crucial for the conduct of the war, is not mentioned in the considerations of Holocaust and genocide researchers. The discussion also fails to address Hamas’s “hybrid” warfare, which is based on a social media manipulation campaign, or the propagandistic struggle in Western countries. Last but not least, there is no mention of the extermination antisemitism formulated in the Hamas charter or the genocidal crimes of October 7, 2023.

“Two people with a history of violence”:9 In this perspective, acknowledging each other’s suffering is said to be the leading idea, one that will bring peace to the Middle East while also dissolving the State of Israel as a Jewish state and ignoring the ethnic cleansing of Jews from Arab lands, anti-Jewish pogroms in the Arab world, or decades of Palestinian terror in the name of liberation.10 But wasn’t the PLO founded before Israel occupied the West Bank or Gaza, from which it unilaterally withdrew? The formulation lacks a profound understanding of antisemitism, ignoring its function, nature, and role in the conflict. We know that antisemitism radicalizes itself and—as can be seen easily today—it becomes successively more aggressive, violent, and eliminatory, as sadly shown by the shooting of Israeli embassy staff in Washington, DC, which was followed by an online hate campaign.11

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The circle’s simplistic worldview, which is detached from the realities in the Middle East, now seeks to dominate the field of Holocaust and genocide studies. Alongside the practice of “multidirectional memory” advocated by literary scholar Michael Rothberg12—who insinuates that the memory of the Holocaust obscures the memory of African slavery, colonial crimes, and other mass atrocities—their positions bear striking parallels to the stereotypical definition of Israel as the “root cause” of the conflict.13

If only the Holocaust would not be so prominent, everything would be better!

Let us delve further into the outlook of the members of this circle. It is small, but in meeting the widespread international impulse to criticize Israel, well beyond the academy, it is all the more prominent for its size. Yet its errors and evasions are legion.

They begin with a general stance of critical disingenuousness. In an open letter published in the New York Review of Books on November 20, 2023, the signatories not only try to portray themselves as balanced—even warning against the dangers of “emotions . . . running high”—but also allow that “antisemitism often increases at times of heightened crisis in Israel-Palestine, as do Islamophobia and anti-Arab racism.”14 Yet they assert at the same time that no comparison of the Holocaust and October 7 is intellectually or morally permissible, declaring that “appealing to the memory of the Holocaust obscures our understanding of the antisemitism Jews face today, and dangerously misrepresents the causes of violence in Israel-Palestine.” The move is typical in its distortions, which carry through much of the circle’s work.

Many of its distortions are factual. In the structure of its arguments, for instance, the group focuses on the issue of intent as part of its strategy to apply the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide to Israel. In doing so, its members regularly insinuate that the IDF deliberately targets innocent civilians and destroys civilian infrastructure, such as schools and mosques.15

In addition, by uncritically adopting Hamas propaganda about facts on the ground, amplified through postcolonial analytic theory, the circle promotes broader misleading historical narratives about Israeli “apartheid” and “Jewish supremacy,” thereby framing October 7 as part of an indigenous uprising and as a legitimate resistance to colonial power.16

Likewise, its members advance a line of post-factual propaganda, which is especially important in Germany. They claim that pro-Palestinians—including, presumably, themselves—are being silenced out of a sense of guilt about the Holocaust.17 Such claims are demonstrably false and require a fact check. Encampments on university campuses that criticize Israel, for instance, and which also critique the IHRA’s working definition of antisemitism, usually receive broad support. But for these scholars, the memory of the Holocaust is literally too much to bear: it colonizes the mind and obscures our understanding of current events in Gaza and the Middle East.

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Even more important than its factual distortions are those the circle promotes on the conceptual level.

Most notably, it seeks to develop new, misleading analytic definitions that drain prior concepts of their power. Under Moses’s much-discussed notion of “permanent security,” for instance, genocide is just one of the three instruments that “the West” employs in its broader anticipatory drive to eliminate threats against itself—for instance, in its war on terror, through which it kills countless civilians. In this view, genocide is not “the crime of crimes” but rather is subsumed under an allegedly larger category, thereby draining it of its full significance. The charge of “genocide” becomes no longer an analytical or legal category, but a political weapon.

Yet the most consequential tool of the circle’s genocide allegation against Israel is its use of genocide inversion—a new phenomenon. In their discussions of Israel-Palestine, its members repeatedly compare the case there to German South West Africa, as well as to Rwanda, Guatemala, Armenia, Kurdistan, Myanmar, and elsewhere. Amos Goldberg: “In most cases of genocide, from Bosnia to Namibia, from Rwanda to Armenia, the perpetrators said they were acting in self-defense.”18 The analytic move produces a moral inversion. Moreover, by including the Nakba within its analysis, it removes the term from its historical and contemporary context within Palestinian society.19

Among specific scholars utilizing this inversion, Bartov—until today the dominant voice among them, and not only in Germany—should be highlighted first and foremost. Despite some earlier doubts, expressed in the New York Times in November 2023, he saw the Israeli invasion of Rafah in May 2024 as clear proof of genocide.20 Indeed, during a lecture to reservists at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in June 2024, he drew parallels between the mindset of Israeli soldiers and the soldiers of the Wehrmacht.21

More recently, Bartov speaks of the cumulative radicalization of Israeli warfare, the aim of which, he claims, was from the outset to make Gaza uninhabitable—though he also repeatedly states that genocide is difficult to prove because there is no “leader’s order” from the Netanyahu government.22 In this tendentious line of argument, the very lack of a direct order to engage in genocide is ironically used to insinuate a historical parallel between Israel and genocidal regimes. We have reached a low point where it’s enough, obviously, to state: “I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It” (Bartov, New York Times, July 15, 2025).23 This source-critical perspective is being disseminated worldwide as academic expertise. It is also being used as a pretext to promote hatred, incitement, and boycotts of Israeli academics.

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A low point was reached on January 27, 2025, the International Holocaust Remembrance Day. The German magazine Der Spiegel published an interview with Bartov with the ahistorical question: “Gaza Equals Auschwitz?” The headline was followed by a subheading that quoted the researcher: “The Holocaust serves Israel as a lesson in inhumanity.” Although the headline was changed shortly afterward, the article remains a one-sided, defamatory attack on the State of Israel.24

While Holocaust inversion is a key line of argument in every conflict and war between Hamas and Israel, as well as in other wars in which Israel is involved, genocide inversion is a relatively new tool in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In short, Holocaust and genocide inversion involves the uncritical application of the scholarship of other genocides to the Israel-Hamas war. In this framework, the State of Israel is always portrayed as the perpetrator, and the Palestinian side is always portrayed as the victim.

Most often, scholar-activists use the German genocide of the Herero and Nama in German South West Africa as a historical analogy to “explain” the war in Gaza. This genocide was a “counter-genocide.” The uprisings of the indigenous Herero and Nama against the German colonial power were the trigger for the extermination order by German commander Lothar von Trotha. By applying this framework to the war in Gaza, scholar-activists exonerate Hamas and its exterminatory antisemitism, and they frame October 7 as indigenous resistance against settler-colonial Israel.25 Islamist and jihadist mass violence and massacres, like those of October 7 in the south of Israel, are portrayed as “legitimate resistance” or as a response to Israel’s policy with regard to Palestinians.26

An influential study on the genocide of the Herero and Nama is that of the aforementioned German Africanist scholar Jürgen Zimmerer, Von Windhoek nach Auschwitz? His argument includes the claim that the Holocaust is conceptually present in all German colonial crimes. As German antisemitism researcher Steffen Klävers in Decolonizing Auschwitz has shown, as have many others, this thesis lacks empirical proof.27 Yet one of the most prominent scholars who supports it is, naturally, Moses, who defines the Holocaust as an “atypical” colonial genocide—Germans felt colonized by Jews—and as a racist hate crime.28

It is not difficult to see this as an attempt to subsume antisemitism under the category of racism. The most questionable aspect of this continuity thesis is that it trivializes the role of antisemitism or defines it by analogy with racism or its subforms. As Israeli Holocaust scholar and IHRA founding member Yehuda Bauer has made clear, the Holocaust was an “ideological project” based specifically on an irreducible antisemitism. The newly founded Crisis Network in this framework represents a further step in implementing new regime of historical interpretation. Viewing the atrocity decontextualized from broader historical events—the declaration of independence of the State of Israel, the 1948 war, and the ethnic cleansing of Jews from Arab lands—is not based on empirical scholarship but rather is motivated by activism that is supposedly “pro-Palestinian.”

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By framing the October 7 massacres as an uprising, Hamas is in turn denied agency and the ability to commit genocide nearly by definition. Likewise, there is no demand that Hamas lay down its arms or release the hostages in Gaza. Such demands are directed entirely at the Israeli government. After more than a year and a half of Holocaust and genocide inversion, as well as a lack of critical analysis of the information emerging from Gaza, every critical question targeting Hamas is now said to be Israeli propaganda.29 Bartov quotes Amnesty, Amnesty quotes Bartov. A closed system of argumentation—contradictions are neither permitted nor deconstructed. Moreover, while reading Holocaust and genocide scholars who are at the forefront of blaming the State of Israel for genocide in Gaza, it becomes obvious that they must only read each other: the lines of argumentation are the same, and a “growing consensus” is insinuated.

There is never any criticism of the Palestinian side, nor any mention of the regular proclamations by Hamas officials to repeat October 7, the calls to attack Jews and Jewish institutions worldwide, the shameless insistence that the deaths in Gaza are deliberate (we need “the blood of women, children and the elderly . . . so that it awakens our revolutionary spirit”),30 and the assertion that Hamas is not responsible for protecting civilians in Gaza.

Palestinians are the eternal victims. And the victims, the colonized, can never be blamed. They do not have to account for October 7 or decades of jihadist terror, because the reason is not antisemitism but the policies, the oppression, and the occupation of the State of Israel.

Antisemitism is also exploding on university campuses worldwide, yet scholars of the “Crisis Network” downplay this dynamic, and they fail to explain that Jews are targeted worldwide in the name of “Palestine solidarity” and “genocide in Gaza.” In short, this network fuels antisemitism and violent anti-Zionism by blaming Israel alone for the war in Gaza. This approach does not promote a peaceful solution; rather, it perpetuates the conflict in the Middle East. At a time when the concept of “multidirectional memory” (Michael Rothberg) is being celebrated as “progressive,” the reception of the war in Gaza is covered monodirectionally. For the “pro-Palestine” crowd, including “progressive” academics, Israel is an apartheid state, an aggressor, a troublemaker, and the root cause of the conflict. Empathy for the permanent war situation of the Israeli civilian population31 is completely lacking among “pro-Palestinian” academics, political elites, and human rights activists.

Indeed, following the ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas on January 19, 2025, and the resumption of fighting in Gaza, they were back: the voices of those who shout out “genocide in Gaza” yet who remained silent during the weeks of the release of Israeli hostages and the accompanying inhuman spectacle broadcast around the world.

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They are also quiet at the moment of this writing, when thousands in Gaza are protesting in the streets against Hamas, while opponents are arrested and tortured or killed by the terrorist organization, which executes them as alleged “spies”—including those who regard themselves as “pro-Palestinian.”32 They were quiet in the past too when Gazans went to the streets in 2019 and 2023 to protest against Hamas in the “We Want to Live” protests.

But there is a glimmer of hope. For the first time in the history of the conflict, voices have been heard, since October 7, 2023, from Palestinians and the Arab and Muslim world, expressing fundamental criticism of the resistance narrative and the one-dimensional view of Palestinians.33 Their perspective on inner-Palestinian life, unresolved problems, and conflicts within Palestine is of crucial importance.

Yet their stories are instructive.

In March 2025, Hamza Abu Howidy, a peace activist from Gaza, from which he fled in August 2023, was a guest in Berlin-Pankow—as always, only possible under police protection. Together with Israeli Shay Dashevsky, he is fighting for new perspectives.34 While in Berlin, at a public event I attended, Hamza Abu Howidy asked the understandable question of why he had to hide. There was no answer.

Another example is Ahmed Al Khatib from Gaza, who lives in the United States and, despite his own family losses in the war, founded Realign for Palestine.35 He belongs to a self-critical generation of Palestinians who want to take a new path. They question a discourse that has dominated Palestinian society and the diaspora for decades. Its rule says: “Israel is always to blame.” Unlike the initiators of the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism and the aforementioned scholar-activists who ignore all these critical and truly progressive voices, they want to criticize Palestine, to make it truly better, and therefore do not need to defame or demonize the State of Israel. They also do not want to dissolve or destroy it—and so they are cast out and denigrated as Zionists.

Why such low expectations of Palestinians? And why are these critics not included in “pro-Palestinian” discourse? These are questions worth pondering. The Palestinian side may be militarily inferior, but for decades it has used antisemitism as part of its arsenal. Global antisemitism, the “devil that never dies”36 that led to the Holocaust, is the most powerful weapon in existence. Orchestrated by Hamas and its allies, it unites the right, the left, and Muslim communities. And so around the world today, it seems, everything and everyone identified as Jewish and not explicitly anti-Israel or anti-Zionist are viewed as legitimate targets of hatred, propaganda, and violence. This makes it all the more important to pay attention to critical Palestinian perspectives that call for peace without simultaneously calling for the elimination of Israel and that reject murderous terror as a means of “resistance.”37

Topics: Israel Initiative

Dr. Verena Buser is a historian of the Holocaust in Berlin. She is a research associate of the Commissioner for Combating Antisemitism in the State of Brandenburg and started her habilitation project at Potsdam University on “German-Jewish Childhood (1920–1945).”

Introduction

Ever since some faculty members exulted over Hamas’s October 7, 2023, murder spree in Israel and then campus encampments began chanting for Zionists to be cast out of the community, we have worried that we would also soon see a quiet, determined campaign to deny tenure to qualified Zionist faculty. The encampments were notable for their noise. The determined assault on pro-Israel faculty would be barely audible, carried out by confidential committees and cloaked in self-righteous if deeply compromised professionalism. We have faced exactly that in our own community, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

As members of the executive committee of Faculty for Academic Freedom and Against Antisemitism, we offer this essay as a warning that it will spread worldwide.

The problem arises when radical anti-Zionists serve on tenure committees that are reviewing expressly Zionist candidates for tenure. When the faculty in both categories are known to hold those opposing beliefs, there is an obvious suggestion of bias and a clear appearance of a conflict of interest. It doesn’t matter how fair and impartial the compromised committee members may be. In the principle that governs both legal and academic professions, among others, the appearance of a conflict of interest must be “managed” by recusal. There is no accusation involved, just the recognizable fact—the appearance of a conflict. There may of course be serious conflicts of interest involved, but managing them by dealing with the appearance of conflicts solves the problem without triggering investigations and hostile confrontations.

At the core of the issue is the academy’s most intractable antisemitic problem: academic disciplines and their local departments that have embraced radical anti-Zionism as part of their core identity. Radical anti-Zionism is an ideology devoted to eliminating the Jewish state. Not to reforming it, not to changing Israeli policies, but rather to erasing Israel as the nation-state and homeland of the Jewish people through violence, boycott, and political implosion, or dissolution into a “one-state solution.” Faculty hopes of harming Zionist Jews have manifested themselves not only through teaching propaganda in the classroom, but also through discriminatory hiring and promotion decisions.

In 2021, some academic departments steeped in the belief that Israel is an unethical state—the only state in the world that does not deserve to exist—began adopting official position statements embodying that conviction. In the wake of 10/7, a still more severe conviction became the norm on the left: that Israel is unreformable, irredeemable, born in original sin. And this belief coalesced around the claim that something evil in Zionism was manifest in the very founding of the Jewish state. The key date for decades had been 1967, when Israel won authority over the West Bank and Gaza from the Jordanian and Egyptian dictators who had ruled there ever since they blocked the local Arabs from their own UN-designated sovereignty. Now the date called out in chants and scrawled on banners was 1948. One could reverse 1967 by making the occupied territories into a Palestinian state. You could only reverse 1948 by eliminating Israel.

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That had long been a minority anti-Zionist position, but in 2023 it became the core of the anti-Zionist left’s self-definition. The number of departments issuing anti-Zionist declarations or manifestos escalated. And with it a new morality began to shape campus politics. If Israel was a demonic entity, people on campus allied with Israel, including faculty, became doubtful, problematic, or flatly unacceptable as colleagues. Variations of “No Zionists permitted here” appeared at some encampments. The BDS anti-normalization strategy of refusing contact with Israelis gained a new element: you shouldn’t normalize Zionism by discussing issues with Zionist colleagues.

This is much worse than the usual academic tussles over methodology. A comparativist may view ethnographic or quantitative approaches as incomplete, even obtuse—but not wicked. By contrast, anti-Zionists position pro-Israel scholars as a moral pollution, as the supporters of racism, child murder, ethnic cleansing, white supremacism, and, finally, genocide. Zionists don’t belong in the room. These are not our words, they are theirs. It follows logically that it is ethically acceptable, even morally necessary, to dispose of Zionist faculty colleagues when the opportunity arises. And it arises as an official opportunity during tenure deliberations.

A good early warning sign of disciplines in trouble is when the national disciplinary organization adopts an anti-Zionist statement. But those national organizations do not include all the faculty in the field, so they are not an automatic match for individual departments. Some local departments want to preserve an environment of open debate and so resist official politicization. The ideological match between disciplinary organization and local departments is mostly consistent in Mideast studies, women’s studies, anthropology, and Asian American studies, among a few others.

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But the embrace of anti-Zionism extends beyond the disciplines more well known to be anti-Zionist. For many people, it’s surprising to learn that fields like urban and regional planning, including the department in Urbana-Champaign, are pervasively anti-Zionist. Likewise, many of us are just learning of an anti-Zionist trend in medical education. The national organizations of psychologists and psychoanalysts have largely been taken over by anti-Zionists, who are increasingly shaping the graduate curriculum in their fields.

When the match is solid—when both the national disciplinary organization and the local department issue or sign anti-Zionist statements—faculty can conclude not only that they should practice anti-Zionist pedagogy but also that personnel decisions should be guided by political convictions. Denying tenure to a Zionist becomes a virtuous action. And that is where we are at the University of Illinois. Yet this is not just an American problem. It corrupts universities throughout the West.

The Benjamin Bross Case

All this came to a head with the tenure deliberations regarding an accomplished junior colleague in UIUC’s School of Architecture. With his ambitious first book, Mexico City’s Zócalo: A History of a Constructed Spatial Identity (Routledge, 2023), in hand, Bross received a strong and detailed endorsement in his third-year review. The book conceptualized and told the story of the 700-year history of this most powerfully symbolic of Mexico’s public spaces, the central square in Mexico City. The School of Architecture’s approval of Bross was reinforced in his fourth year. That same year the program nominated him for an award for scholarly excellence and the school’s director asked him to take on the task of coauthoring a book about the campus’s famous Memorial Stadium.

As Bross points out, “unlike the Depression-era projects administered by several government agencies, including the Public Works Administration (PWA), the Works Progress Administration (WPA), and the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), Memorial Stadium was built in the first third of what would eventually be dubbed the ‘Roaring Twenties.’ The drive and eventual construction of the stadium embodies, as all spatial products do, a set of social, political, economic, and aesthetic values and aspirations of its time.” It “is part of the dialogue of the interwar years, and the impact of major civic buildings that expressed the arrival of American optimism and economic dominance on the world stage.” As the UI administration urged, The University of Illinois Memorial Stadium (Routledge, 2024) was completed and published in time for the building’s one-hundredth anniversary.

Other than Dr. Bross having published several more essays and having received enthusiastic reviews of his teaching, the only other notable feature in his tenure profile came in the wake of Hamas’s October 7, 2023, assault. Bross, who had kept quiet about his Zionist sympathies, now made them public. Before October 2023, Bross received a glowing third-year evaluation, a nomination for a scholarly prize, and an invitation by his school’s director to write a second book; in 2024, his tenure review committee suddenly went against the department’s prior endorsements of Bross and recommended denying him tenure through a one-sentence notice that his publications and teaching were inadequate. Meanwhile, other faculty were expressing their rage at Israel’s conduct of the war in Gaza.

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The School of Architecture took no notice of the obvious conflicts at stake. Meanwhile, it made several other procedural mistakes in conducting Bross’s review. The school’s lax observation of university procedures had long been an issue. The local AAUP chapter’s governing board had been hearing that concern from one of its members for a decade. Now procedural negligence gave committed anti-Zionists an opportunity to act: first, when they were appointed to a Zionist’s tenure review committee and apparently saw no cause to recuse themselves; second, when they recommended outside reviewers instead of the senior faculty member in the candidate’s field of urban studies (as the School of Architecture requires); and third, when it came to an up-or-down vote on tenure. A negative vote from the initial committee provided all the cover that further review bodies needed to recommend a terminal contract.

The outside letters, for now, are confidential, and therefore we are unable to know what was said in them. We are unlikely to learn what they said unless they are released as part of the discovery process in legal proceedings. We are less concerned with the identity of the letter writers than with the content of the letters. This leaves us evidence in the form of the rest of his tenure case, the public record of anti-Zionist activism of members of the various tenure and appeals committees at UIUC, and our professional judgment about his books and essays and teaching evaluations. The seven of us on the executive committee of Faculty for Academic Freedom and Against Antisemitism (FAFAA), representing ninety-two faculty members at UIUC and UIC, gave ourselves a challenge: to construct plausible arguments against the quality of Benjamin Bross’s scholarship. We’ve had quite a few years’ experience with negative outside letters in numerous disciplines, but we couldn’t devise any in this case.

Dr. Bross’s publications, while intricate and rich in historical context, are also beautifully written and highly readable. Their range of theoretical references are familiar to many humanities scholars. They seek a broad academic audience, and several of us felt ourselves very much among his intended readers, people concerned about national histories and the significance of architecture for public life.

It would also be interesting to see a court-mandated collection of emails, Instagram messages, and phone records. What did committee members say privately about Zionists, antisemitism, Israel, Palestinians, or Bross himself? Were they in personal contact with reviewers? It would be better for everyone not to have to go that route, but we are in favor of doing so if justice cannot be achieved in any other way.

A discovery process might also reveal further disqualifying facts, such as membership in the radically anti-Zionist group Faculty for Justice in Palestine (FJP) or evidence of a personal alliance with Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP). Both FJP and SJP are considered hate groups by all mainstream Jewish organizations.

FAFAA became involved at Bross’s request after the School of Architecture endorsed the promotion and tenure committee’s recommendation to deny tenure. We have no reason to believe the school’s director acted with malicious intent. His skill at assuring that regulations were followed and procedures were carried out properly, however, is another matter. He failed in that responsibility, then passively accepted the committee’s recommendation. The case is riddled with procedural errors. That gave Bross the basis of an appeal to the UIUC campus Faculty Advisory Committee (FAC). Unfortunately, that introduced several more apparent conflicts of interest among the FAC’s own members.

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Several members of FAFAA’s executive committee already knew Bross, though not all as a close friend. But it was helpful to have prior experience of his reliability. It’s necessary to make a judgment about that when a faculty member comes forward with a complaint. Many people are unreliable. Moreover, even when someone has been unfairly treated, they may represent themselves poorly, inevitably interpreting events through a glass darkly. Bross, however, kept meticulous records, and he was very thorough in gathering documents. We followed up by interviewing people so as not to rely on secondhand testimony.

What follows includes an account of the two letters the FAFAA executive committee wrote to the FAC and to all the relevant administrators, as well as to the Board of Trustees (the full letters can be read here). Perhaps this will provide some guidance to other campuses that face this challenge. If other scholars encounter comparable conflicts of interest when anti-Zionist faculty seek to eliminate their Zionist colleagues, as they surely will, these letters show what evidence we were willing to use and exactly how we addressed the problem. We discussed the options in detail before deciding how to deal with individual faculty conflicts of interest.

The names of the members of the two tenure committees are not confidential, and the names of the members of the campus-level Faculty Advisory Committee are on the university’s website. Nonetheless, FAFAA struggled about whether to name them and to document their individual apparent conflicts of interest. In the end, there was no way of convincing anyone that the apparent conflicts of interest are real and serious without documenting them. That is the advice we give to others who confront this challenge. There is a universe, of course, in which people say, “Thank you for alerting me to my apparent conflict of interest.” And there is the familiar world in which people become defensive and insist they are free of any unconscious bias. We did not know which world we would find ourselves in, but we expect to find out.

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The letters we sent to UI administrators detail individuals’ conflicts of interest by name and are published on the FAFAA website. Here, we have a different aim: to encourage reflection on the rhetoric as it applies to its faculty endorsers everywhere, including the campuses of those who read our essay—campuses that will be conducting their own tenure reviews.

When people sign a passionately anti-Zionist letter, they accept its terms and commit to its politics. They adopt its voice as their own. They make it their own speech act and communicate it to their students and colleagues. As the letters accumulate names, they accumulate publicity. Indeed, that is the purpose of gathering more signatures. The rhetoric may or may not be precisely what you would use, but you set aside your doubts and sign. Or the language may give you exactly what you want to say. The difference is erased; it is irrelevant. You have made your choice.

The Appearance of Conflicts of Interest

As the letters attest, one of Benjamin Bross’s tenure review committee members apparently expressly told another person in the program that Dr. Bross’s Zionism was unacceptable. Although that faculty member later cycled off the committee to serve in another capacity, she was among those recommending outside reviewers. Not only should someone with such an apparent conflict not serve on a Zionist faculty member’s review committee, but they should also have no role in recommending outside reviewers.

Moreover, the School of Architecture’s rules call for the senior member in the field to recommend the reviewers. Another one of Bross’s tenure review committee members signed a “Call for Immediate Action” letter that condemned Israel for its role in the current Gaza war: “Such deliberate acts are considered both genocide—deliberately inflicting conditions of life to bring about the destruction of a group in whole or in part, and urbicide—deliberate destruction of built environments.” The letter also issued a broad declaration: “We stand in opposition to colonialism, militarism, apartheid, racism, white supremacy, and genocide in Palestine and around the world. We recall the historical role of educational and cultural institutions in anti-war, anti-apartheid, anti-imperial, and anti-genocide movements, and refuse the current institutional silence as Israel continues to commit crimes against humanity.” The letters FAFAA sent to the Board of Trustee and senior administrators detail all such political commitments that we know of, but we do not assume our citations are comprehensive. In any case, the UI rules are clear: “Any faculty member with a conflict of interest, or the appearance of a conflict of interest, should not participate (e.g., review, evaluate, advocate, or vote) in a candidate’s promotion and tenure review.

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That faculty member later asserted in writing that she had no knowledge of Dr. Bross’s Zionist commitments, but Bross’s wife had earlier told her in considerable detail of the whole family’s Zionist commitments. Their son was in Israel on October 7, 2023, the day of the Hamas assault. The family as a whole traveled to Israel after October 7, and, while Dr. Bross had to return to teach, Bross’s wife Datia stayed on to help with the harvest, as many of the foreign agricultural workers had fled the country. Datia told the faculty member in question that Dr. Bross encouraged her to stay. We should point out that this is exactly the kind of dispute that recusal enables a campus to avoid.

In a different but equally remarkable case, one of Bross’s tenure review committee members organized an entire conference in support of the protestors who were arrested during the campus’s Gaza solidarity encampment. The conference, “Protest in the Post-Political Era,” drew sympathetic comparison between the spring 2024 anti-Zionist encampments at UIUC and elsewhere and “the Civil Rights movement’s struggles for justice staged through boycotts and marches and in the public spaces of buses, lunch counters, and bridges, and the Stonewall riot against police raids of a gay bar in New York City.” What they did, which included resisting arrest, her announcement added, was “the last resort of people for whom the conventional methods of affecting change (though voting or litigation) have failed.” Bross organized a group letter supporting the state’s attorney’s decision to prosecute those arrested, and the letter was published in the local newspaper. Pro-Palestinian groups were agitating to drop the prosecutions. The issue was hotly debated in the community.

Documenting the Case and Its Future

The FAFAA website includes a page with additional documents linked to the case, including a Bross family biography, Bross’s CV, and the crucial third-year review letter, which states that Bross is doing “a remarkable job” and concludes that the committee producing the letter “did not see any major areas of concern in your progress toward the tenure and promotion review that will begin in year five.” There are none of the stern warnings that third-year letters often include. Indeed, the following year the School of Architecture nominated him for an award in recognition of his scholarly accomplishments.

There is a still broader and equally challenging set of questions that this case raises. First, would Benjamin Bross have been hired if he had revealed his Zionist sentiments at that point? The answer is almost certainly “No.” But that probability applies still more decisively to young scholars who write books or essays grounded in a belief that Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish state. It no longer matters to anti-Zionists if they are critical of Israeli policies and do thorough original research. If the core assumption about Israel’s legitimacy is there, many humanities departments will cast such candidates aside. That leaves us with the question University of Maryland historian Jeffrey Herf asked at a May 18, 2025, conference at the Center for Jewish History: Is there a future in the academy for young Zionist scholars?

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For programs like Urbana-Champaign’s Department of Urban and Regional Planning, whose faculty unanimously endorsed a statement vilifying Israel, the answer seems clear. The statement explicitly asserts that the opposition to Zionism is both political and moral:

We refuse to be silent as tens of thousands of innocent people are dispossessed and hundreds more killed. . . . We join the Palestinian people in their immense sorrow and anger and stand alongside of [sic] them in their struggle against apartheid, colonization and state oppression. . . . We learn from a long history of struggles against racist oppression and their continuation in the present. We believe that the fight against white supremacy, colonialism and anti-Semitism are inseparable. We welcome those who have expressed their horror at the violence being wrought on Palestine and its people. . . . We call on everyone to recognize that these injustices are not just abstract or historical; they are active, ongoing and nowhere more embodied than in the Palestinian movement for liberation confronting the Israeli settler colonial state.

In April 2025, the UIUC provost, John Coleman, wrote to Dr. Bross to say: “I intend to request the Board of Trustees issue you a notice of nonreappointment and offer a terminal contract for the academic year 2025–2026.” Bross will receive that letter in August 2025, informing him that he has begun his final year at Illinois. If the UI administration can be convinced that the process was unfair, perhaps the clock can be reset and 2025–2026 can be declared Bross’s fifth year. A review committee can be appointed outside the School of Architecture. This essay is timed to interrupt the train denying tenure that has already left the station and is moving rapidly ahead.

In response to a Title VI complaint alleging that the campus inadequately addressed antisemitism, the university in September 2024 signed a “resolution agreement” under the auspices of the Office of Civil Rights (OCR) in the Department of Education. According to the OCR, the school “agreed to take the steps necessary to ensure its education community can learn, teach, and work without an unredressed antisemitic hostile environment, or any other hostility related to stereotypes about shared ancestry.” The counsel who negotiated the agreement has advised that the bias infecting Bross’s tenure process, coupled with acquiescence by campus administration, violates the resolution agreement.

Topics: Israel Initiative

Cary Nelson is Jubilee Professor Emeritus at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and the author, most recently, of Mindless: What Happened to Universities?

Richard Ross is David C. Baum Professor of Law at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

The protest movement that spread across many American colleges and universities in the wake of the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023, received extensive press coverage—especially when the protests took place at elite institutions. It has been framed naturally with regard to the Gaza War. The federal government’s response has also been connected to the American public’s growing disenchantment with higher education. Yet one aspect of the movement has surprisingly received scant attention, if any: the disproportionate participation of women.

Casual observation of encampments on different campuses—one of the authors of this piece is from Columbia, the other from Stanford—detected a clear gender gap: many more women than men. Of course, no reliable census could be taken, but the overrepresentation of women is corroborated by the objective data of arrest lists. The students suspended after the NYPD dismantled the first encampment at Columbia on April 17, 2024, bears out a huge gender imbalance. Nearly two-thirds of the officially suspended were Barnard students, i.e., women (58 of 91). Of the 33 Columbia students suspended, only 10 were men. The nine agitators arrested on April 30, 2024, in Barnard College’s Milstein Library included only one man. At Stanford, 9 of the 13 students arrested on June 5, 2024, for occupying the president’s office were women.

Last year’s pattern of gender imbalance is continuing. The list of the arrestees from the occupation of Columbia’s library on May 7, 2025, includes 61 women and 19 men.

Were the encampments protesting the Gaza War a new women’s movement? And if so, how can we explain young women taking sides so emphatically without any criticism of the patriarchal culture of Hamas? In the Columbia encampment, there was an open display of Hamas insignia, and it is unclear if any protestors had a problem with its appearance.

We have been intrigued that no reporter or scholar has raised these gender questions. We are therefore trying to research answers by looking for hard data to explain this overrepresentation of women. To begin with, we urge that more analysis be conducted. The arrest figures only capture the extreme end of the movement, and some groups in the encampments may have—for various reasons—chosen to avoid situations where they risked arrest. In addition to the gender disparities, there are other features of the movement that require research: it is important to know the mix of undergraduate and graduate students, the racial and ethnic composition, and even more the role of international students.

However, we want to return to the issue of gender. It is striking that prior to the first inauguration of Donald Trump, there was an intense flurry of activism among women, but prior to his 2025 inauguration there was a marked absence of any similar protest movement. Unlike in 2017, young women’s recent campus organizing is not focused on traditional issues that have been important to women, like lack of access to abortion. Rather all activism has been primarily directed toward the war in Gaza. For now, we can do little more than speculate, but we hope to encourage debate and discussion of the following hypotheses that might account for the gendered profile of the movement.

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1. Empathy and oppression: One could make the essentialist claim that women have a greater capacity for empathy than do men. Alternatively, one could propose the less essentialist and more psychosocial claim that women have more empathy for the oppressed because they experience (or feel or understand) oppression in their own lives. They are drawn to fighting oppression because of their experience of oppression. They do not want to see innocent people oppressed or killed.

2. Glass ceiling: Although many of the protests took place at institutions where it is fair to describe the students as privileged, female students may well see themselves as disadvantaged, facing prospects of lower earning potentials than their male peers or of glass ceilings in their careers. A preexisting grievance mentality—no matter how objectively legitimate—may be a source of subjective discontent that could translate into a predisposition to protest. Can anger about one topic be transferred to mobilization around another?

3. The gender gap: It has been established that there is a political gender gap among youth (of course the participants on campus were nearly exclusively young). In 2023, 51 percent of young (ages 18–29) women identified as Democrats, compared to only 38 percent of young men. It is likely that female students, on average, were politically further to the left, and thus were more likely to participate in protests that have a leftist character (indeed at this historical moment, right-wing protests are themselves much less likely than left-wing protests).

4. Media framing: News reports of the Gaza War have regularly announced casualty figures. There has been debate over the reliability of figures, since they have been issued by a Hamas-controlled public health department office. Hamas clearly has an interest in amplifying the public impact of casualties. Whatever the accuracy of the numbers themselves, reports have regularly referenced the number or percentage of women and children among the killed. This framing, i.e., the specific mentioning of women and child casualties, may have a particular mobilizing effect on women.

5. The humanities faculty effect: While we know (from signatures on petitions) that faculty support for the protest encampments came largely from humanities disciplines, we have no hard evidence about the academic specialization of the students. There is some suggestion, again through anecdotes, that women’s studies programs and centers acted as nodes for the protest networks. Indeed, Barnard’s administration removed a “Solidarity with Palestine” statement from the website of its Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies department in October 2023. Was it the same at other women’s and gender studies programs? Was this support in the context of women’s studies linked to assignments of Judith Butler’s writings, where the gender discourse and the critiques of Israel intersect? Or are other venues in universities equally or more involved in mobilizing students? More analysis needs to be done on the catalysts of mobilization: are they the texts that are assigned or particular programs with an activist agenda, or are student organizations more important than faculty, programs, or departments?

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6. Men are more involved in STEM: If the overrepresentation of the humanities among encampment-supporting faculty carries over to the students (admittedly a big if—we have to consider that student commitment may not be a result of faculty partisanship), another aspect may be that STEM students, disproportionately male, are less exposed to the humanities and therefore less exposed to the anti-Israel bias disseminated in parts of the humanities. In other words, the issue is not (only) the overrepresentation of women but (also) the underrepresentation of men. Male students have historically been more inclined to be STEM students, although that is gradually changing. Among the students arrested at Columbia for the occupation of Hamilton Hall, none were from the School of Engineering. Of the 13 students arrested at Stanford, only one was from Engineering. Engineering students may be less politicized, or more conservative, or simply too busy with problem sets and therefore without enough time to protest.

7. Appeal of patriarchy: However we explain the lower participation of men, it appears that women were present in the encampments in higher numbers. This phenomenon needs serious inquiry, since what transpired in many (though not all!) of the protests was ultimately an extended display of public support by a women’s movement—perhaps even a feminist movement—for the unquestionably patriarchal and misogynistic forces of Hamas. This implicit endorsement of patriarchy by young women echoes the failure of the more established women’s movement to condemn the rape warfare that Hamas carried out against Israeli women. Why did the encampment women feel comfortable supporting Hamas? Was there any genuine debate over this problem among the participants?

8. Gender politics/gender crisis: That presumably progressive women on campus support an anti-war movement makes sense, but their de facto support of Hamas is confounding. Indeed, in some demonstrations, Yahya Sinwar, the former leader of Hamas, was explicitly celebrated. For example, at a Columbia fraternity house on November 10, 2024, an event took place to commemorate the takeover of Hamilton Hall in the previous April. A spoken word performance of Sinwar’s last will and testament was part of the event, as described here. Perhaps the protestors found some anti-intellectual pleasure in denying that rapes took place (like old Communists who pretended there were no gulags, although they knew better). Alternatively, the possible attraction of some to the paradigm of the Hamas fighter may have amounted to a reaction against the sort of degraded masculinity they encounter in progressive environments at college (“soy boys”). Perhaps their protest was linked to anxiety about their own prospects for career and family—or was it about anger that their world had shut down during Covid?

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These are only a few hypotheses, which may be proven wrong, but by presenting them, we hope to prod more discussion. It is clear that women’s leading role in the encampment movement has been obscured. The media firestorm at Columbia about the violent anti-Zionist rhetoric of one protestor, Khymani James, was noteworthy for instantly elevating one young man to the status of protest “leader.” While he had certainly been vocal online and sought attention by posting a video of himself calling for the murder of Zionists, the way journalists immediately appointed him as a leader recalled to us how the press picked and chose along gender lines during another protest movement. Historians have long recognized the central role that women of color like Ella Baker or Rosa Parks played during the long struggle for civil rights for African Americans. Ella Baker organized strategically with the younger generation of student activists through the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) to move the civil rights movement forward. However rather than promoting Baker, the media preferred to feed the public’s fascination with great men like Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcom X, keeping women in the margins. Even most references to Rosa Parks mischaracterize her as a weary old lady who just wanted a seat on the bus, rather than a long-time warrior for equality and civil rights.

With this history of the gender-biased press coverage of the civil rights movement in mind, we point out how no journalist appears to have bothered to report on the prominence of women in the Gaza War protests. Without noticing it, they cannot even begin to analyze it. Rather than continuing that erasure of women from this history, we are calling for research to understand it and to address the glaring problem: how self-proclaimed progressive women on American campuses who condemned the murder of women and children chose to align with a movement defined by misogyny in Gaza.

Topics: Israel Initiative

Rebecca Kobrin is the Russell and Bettina Knapp Associate Professor of American Jewish History at Columbia University. She is the co-director of Columbia’s Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies and was a member of its Antisemitism Task Force.

Russell A. Berman is the Walter A. Haas Professor in the Humanities at Stanford and Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, where he directs the Working Group on the Middle East and the Islamic World. He previously served as Senior Advisor on the Policy Planning Staff of the United States Department of State and as a Commissioner on the Commission on Unalienable Rights. He is currently a member of the National Humanities Council. He is the Editor Emeritus of Telos and President of the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute.

A version of this article originally appeared in Die Welt on April 4, 2025. It is published here by permission.

Nearly simultaneously with the Hamas attacks on Israel of October 7, 2023, a coordinated program of vicious activism spread across American universities. Denunciations of Israel went hand in hand with harassment of Jewish students. University property was destroyed, barricades were built to limit access to campus facilities, and buildings were occupied and vandalized. Slogans expressing solidarity with the war dead in Gaza were quickly overshadowed by giddy celebrations of Hamas, whose flag and headbands became ubiquitous. Moderate students who might empathize with a two-state solution were pressured into endorsing a globalized intifada—a term that means carrying terrorism and random killing into the heart of America. Bring October 7 to Harvard and Berkeley. “Free Palestine” turned into “Death to America” and “Kill the Cops.” We were not facing a Habermasian “reasoning public sphere” engaged in liberal political discussion and the free expression of opinion. Far from it. This was organized violence, destructive chaos, and hatred.

Nor was this an accident. Commenting on the deteriorating situation on the campuses, the Director of National Intelligence—in the Biden administration—Avril Haines pointed to the role that foreign powers, notably Iran, were playing in inciting the violence: “In recent weeks, Iranian government actors have sought to opportunistically take advantage of ongoing protests regarding the war in Gaza, using a playbook we’ve seen other actors use over the years. We have observed actors tied to Iran’s government posing as activists online, seeking to encourage protests, and even providing financial support to protesters.”1 The same Iran that had attempted assassinations of Iranian dissidents in the United States—reminiscent of the Mykonos killings in Berlin in 1992—was also planning to kill President Trump himself. And it was this Iran that acted as a prime mover behind the campus chaos. That national security concern is certainly reason enough for the federal government to become involved in the universities, but there are two more. The systematic attacks on Jewish students and the failure of university administrators to defend them represent a breach of the obligation to protect civil rights. In addition, the entrenched ideologized swamp at the universities has included extensive advocacy for Hamas, clearly an illegal act of support for an officially designated terrorist organization.

In many cases—but not all—university leaders failed to address the glaring problems. A kind interpretation of this failure of leadership is that typical administrators are just not equal to the challenge. Perhaps some, in the manner of naive liberals, preferred to regard criminal activity as freedom of expression, as if persecuting a minority or celebrating terrorists were just allowable opinions, indistinguishable from others in an age of cultural relativism. These are the administrators who have no moral compass. A more pessimistic—and realistic—explanation is that there is sympathy for left-wing antisemitism throughout the academic bureaucracy.

Because the academic world could not act to correct these conditions, the Trump administration has had to step in. Of course, one would prefer it if society or the private sector would regulate itself, but the universities have failed in this task of self-administration. A long overdue correction is underway now. The federal government could not stand by in the face of these three disasters: the civil rights abuses inherent in the systematic antisemitism that has defined the protest movement, the celebration and support for the Hamas terrorists, and the intentional subversion of American institutions by the Iranian enemy.

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The Trump administration has begun to pursue a two-pronged strategy in order to force needed reforms in the universities: one prong directed at the institutions, the other at the activists themselves. As far as the institutions are concerned, it is important to understand how much all universities, including private ones, are dependent on financial support from the federal government. This support primarily involves funding for research projects in the sciences and medicine. By suspending this funding, the government is putting enormous pressure on universities, demanding that they fix the problems before the funds are released. This strategy has incited an important intra-university conflict among different sectors. Withholding funding hurts the various natural sciences fields and medicine, but it is no secret that it has been the humanities that have been highly ideologized and “woke.” It is there that aggressive activism and racial obsession have been nurtured. It is the humanists who have given antisemitism and terrorism an intellectual veneer. It is the humanists who have trampled on ethical sensibility by teaching the activists that the end justifies the means. If the universities want to regain their federal funding to continue their genuinely important research in the natural sciences, they will have to fix their humanities problem.

Universities will also have to begin to uphold their own disciplinary policies against disruptions. All the institutions ravaged by protests had sets of rules, but most failed to enforce them. If the universities had adhered to their existing policies, the situation might not have gotten out of hand. This failure of the administrators allowed the protests to metastasize, which in turn opened the door for government pressure.

At the same time, the government is also going after activists directly. At stake are not alleged criminal activities but instead violations of immigration regulations: the targets are therefore international students on student visas. According to Secretary of State Rubio, approximately three hundred student visas have been canceled because of activism inconsistent with existing code. The number may be higher by now. Who has this affected? Only a few names are known at this point; some former students have chosen to leave the country, while others are being held in detention awaiting hearings, as their lawyers challenge their arrest. The details in each case will be important, including the specific proof that the government can present to show what each student did. Yet because these are immigration administrative deliberations, not criminal proceedings, the burden of proof is low.

However, the principle matters. Defenders of the activists claim that they have a right to free speech that has been curtailed. In contrast Secretary Rubio has countered that any applicant for a student visa who arrives at an American consulate and announces support for Hamas or another terrorist organization would be promptly turned down; and therefore an international student already in the United States who begins to support Hamas or engage in violent demonstrations should have the visa withdrawn. The U.S. government is not obligated to provide student visas to individuals who call for “death to America.” As the famous Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson reportedly declared decades ago, “the Constitution is not a suicide pact.” Nor is the American government obligated to welcome foreign proponents of Jew-hatred or any other racism. Importing antisemitism is not productive for liberal democracies (a lesson that Germany should have learned, at the latest in the Dokumenta catastrophe). The pressure that the Trump administration is putting on the universities may restore them to their appropriate role as sites of learning and not of mob violence.

Topics: Israel Initiative

Russell A. Berman is the Walter A. Haas Professor in the Humanities at Stanford and Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, where he directs the Working Group on the Middle East and the Islamic World. He previously served as Senior Advisor on the Policy Planning Staff of the United States Department of State and as a Commissioner on the Commission on Unalienable Rights. He is currently a member of the National Humanities Council. He is the Editor Emeritus of Telos and President of the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute.

Elia’s talk was sponsored by the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Department at California State University, Long Beach. A more recent event with a similar message, entitled “Feminist and Queer Solidarities with Palestine,”2 featuring three speakers and moderated by Paola Bacchetta from the Gender and Women’s Studies Department at University of California, Berkeley, took place on February 11, although this event convened off campus and over Zoom. Finally, Elia was reportedly scheduled to speak again, this time at the University of Ottawa on February 25, however the event listing for her talk, entitled “Weaponizing Feminism in the Service of Genocide” and sponsored by the university’s Institute of Feminist and Gender Studies, has since been removed.3

If these were isolated incidents, they would be depressing enough. But deplorable events and statements like these are now commonplace in activist circles, making it distressingly obvious that much of mainstream feminism has been severely compromised (if not completely captured) by ostensibly “progressive” voices that embrace and espouse a toxic blend of postmodern and pro-Islamist (anti-Western) ideologies. The activists’ claim that feminism is incompatible with Zionism nullifies the courageous efforts and accomplishments of thousands of Jewish women who worked to defend and promote the welfare, dignity, and rights of women at home and around the world in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

This tragic and shameful chapter in the history of the women’s movement merits careful documentation and analysis elsewhere. Meanwhile, note that this pseudo-scholarly propaganda shares the same well-worn playbook with Holocaust denialism and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. In this scenario, victims of mass murder (or their lineal descendants) are charged with fabricating or grossly exaggerating the extent of the crimes committed against them, with a view to extorting some unfair advantage and justifying (or covering up) their own dishonest agenda. In the process, the perpetrators of these crimes are recast as the victims of a Jewish or Zionist conspiracy to mislead and manipulate a credulous (non-Jewish) public in the service of a nebulous but sinister worldwide conspiracy.

In many instances, this rhetorical strategy is employed quite deliberately and tailored to fit whatever horrors it was designed to minimize, excuse, or distract us from. After all, it has demonstrated its ability to mobilize anti-Jewish mistrust and hatred among diverse groups very effectively for well over a century! Many who twist the truth in this way are often quite conscious of the fact that they are fabricating stories and/or denying reality for political gain. They know what they are doing when they are doing it, and why. Another group that endorses statements like these doesn’t know—and more importantly, doesn’t care—if the claims they endorse are true or not. Truth is expendable or irrelevant to them. If their false claims and accusations produce the intended results and perform the rhetorical work they were designed to do, they are satisfied with their pronouncements.

For the sake of convenience, let us call the first group “the haters” and the second group “the cynics.” Finally, among attendees at events like this there is a third group: credulous consumers of propaganda who sincerely believe that this pernicious nonsense is true rather than a willful misrepresentation of reality. For them, truth matters, although they themselves are quite unaware of what it actually is. It may be impossible to quantify precisely how many “true believers” fall into each of these categories in any given instance—or at any given event. But if recent experience is any indication, the first two groups comprise the most hateful and intransigent antisemites and are unwilling or incapable of engaging in meaningful dialogue with Israelis or Zionists. But while it is tempting to write them all off completely, some credulous consumers of antisemitic propaganda are acting on misplaced idealism and may eventually come around.

What are the psychological characteristics that these groups share, and what are the differences between them? The haters—those who knowingly invent and disseminate antisemitic propaganda—are quite conscious of their motivations for doing so. But the cynics, who are indifferent to the truth or falsity of their beliefs, and the credulous consumers who march and chant alongside them are mostly unconscious of the mental processes that produce their reality distortions. The mental processes that facilitate their collective flight from reality presumably include Freudian defense mechanisms like displacement, denial, projection, reversal, splitting, and rationalization (among others). But while their reliance on defense mechanisms may be relatively transparent to outsiders, their motives for clinging so fiercely to their illusions—and for deploying these defense mechanisms in the first place—are equally, if not more, unconscious.

In addition to misplaced idealism, the many motives at play among the more credulous type of feminist anti-Zionists may include guilt, ressentiment, a need to belong, and a narcissistic need to be experienced by others as especially virtuous or politically astute, progressive, etc. But whatever the underlying motives and mechanisms, they engender a seemingly insatiable appetite for lies, provided that the lies they swallow comport with their pre-existing beliefs and prejudices and come from an authoritative or “trustworthy” source that validates their belief system.

The greater someone’s indifference or hostility to the truth, the more dogmatic they are, and therefore the more likely they are to harbor authoritarian tendencies. As Theodor Adorno and Else Frenkel-Brunswik point out in The Authoritarian Personality, traits like dogmatism and antisemitism are both highly correlated with authoritarianism. But while Adorno et al. focused exclusively on right-wing antisemitism, Holocaust minimization and denial now flourish on the extreme right and the extreme left. This comes as a surprise to many people, including many social scientists, because left-wingers see themselves as emphatically anti-authoritarian and embrace many causes that right-wingers typically oppose, like trade unions, reproductive rights for women, LGBTQ rights, indigenous peoples’ struggles, racial and environmental justice, universal healthcare coverage, etc. Canadian social psychologist Bob Altemeyer, a leading researcher in this field, even declared that left-wing authoritarianism is “like the Loch Ness Monster: an occasional shadow, but no monster.”4

The tacit implication of this remark is that left-wing authoritarianism is a rumor with no substance. But if recent studies are any indication, right- and left-wing authoritarians both disdain liberal democratic norms and institutions, harbor intolerant or openly hostile attitudes toward those who don’t share their worldview, and share a pronounced willingness to resort to violence and intimidation to persuade others to dance to their tune. Moreover, they often embrace conspiracy theories that give voice to their irrational fears and wishes, cover up contradictions, and fill in gaps in their explanatory models and narratives about the way the world works.

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So, let’s face it, shall we? There was always antisemitism on the left, which is why August Bebel denounced it as “the socialism of fools.” Granted, left-wing antisemitism was less powerful and conspicuous in North America than it was in Europe and the Middle East until recently. But it has been proliferating steadily since the collapse of the Oslo peace process and the Durban Conference on Racism, and it now constitutes a grave and growing threat to Jewish communities—as well as to serious scholarship—all around the globe.

So, let’s ask ourselves: what accounts for the deep-seated ideological differences between right-wingers and left-wingers, as a rule? The crucial difference, psychologically speaking, may lie in the patterns of identification and idealization that they exhibit or embrace. Right-wing authoritarians typically idealize and identify with the charismatic leader, the strongman, or the aggressor. They value tradition and hierarchy, and they are fixated in stage three or stage four of what Lawrence Kohlberg identified as “conventional normativity.” By contrast with their right-wing counterparts, left-wing authoritarians identify with and idealize the (real or imagined) victims of aggression. Their ethical sensibility does not align with pre-conventional, conventional, or post-conventional morality (in Kohlberg’s terms) but is often anti-conventional in character. This yields different ideological outcomes and cognitive distortions than one finds on the extreme right. Right-wing authoritarians typically divide people into two categories, e.g., the strong versus the weak, the winners versus the losers, the superior versus the inferior, the pure versus the impure. By contrast, their left-wing counterparts bifurcate humanity into the oppressed and their oppressors, imperialists and anti-imperialists, the good and the bad, BIPOC and white people. These different ways of carving up humanity prompt right-wing authoritarians to insist on racial or religious purity as a condition of group membership. Left-wing authoritarians, by contrast, aspire to be more inclusive on race and religion but nevertheless insist on ideological purity.

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For example, consider this quote from John Molyneux of the Socialist Workers Party (UK). He claimed that “an illiterate, conservative, superstitious Muslim Palestinian who supports Hamas is more progressive that an educated liberal atheist Israeli who supports Zionism (even critically).”5 This illustrates the left-wing authoritarians’ tendency to idealize and identify with members of groups that he or she believes are oppressed and, conversely, to devalue, denigrate, or dismiss any member of a group that he or she identifies as oppressors. The fact that the illiterate, conservative, and superstitious Hamas supporter is likely to be intensely patriarchal, misogynistic, and anti-LGBTQ+, embracing a political movement that is theocratic, authoritarian, and antisemitic to the core—while the liberal Zionist has few, if any, of these attributes—is irrelevant in this political calculus. The former is deemed more “progressive” by virtue of his membership in an oppressed minority, while the latter failed the test for ideological purity, which consists of a resolute rejection of Zionism, coupled with the tacit acceptance or active support of an Islamist organization—one that trains young children to hate and kill Jews, not just Israelis.

In 2008, when Molyneux made this absurd claim, many people on the left still regarded a statement like this as over the top, if not absolute rubbish. But not anymore. Now it is simply conventional wisdom in many, if not most, activist circles—a litmus test that determines whether someone is deemed eligible to participate in “progressive” spaces. So, let’s address the elephant in the room, shall we? The more deeply enmeshed the left becomes with Islamist organizations and movements, the more authoritarian and estranged from reality it becomes. Unless or until these trends are addressed and reversed, antisemitism will continue to flourish in its ranks.

Daniel Burston is Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, and Editor-in-Chief of Kesher: Journal of the Association of Jewish Psychologists. He is the author of Anti-Semitism and Analytical Psychology: Jung, Politics and Culture (Routledge, 2021) and co-editor (with Kurt Jacobsen) of Authoritarianism in All Its Guises: Right, Left and Center (Routledge, 2025).

Topics: Israel Initiative

The following text is based on a lecture given by the author at the event series “‘Das ganze Grauen’: Psychoanalytische Aufklärung nach dem 7. Oktober” [“‘The Whole Horror’: Psychoanalytic Enlightenment after October 7”] in July 2024 at the International Psychoanalytic University (IPU) Berlin. Translated by Julius Bielek.

1

In terms of world politics, 1978 was not a particularly outstanding year. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the second oil price shock both cast their shadows forward, but developments in the Middle East and on the oil markets only came to a head in 1979. Yet like many other years of lesser significance in terms of world politics, 1978 stands out in cultural history. Historical experiences are not only processed by art, culture, and science but are also sometimes anticipated in a distorted form. For example, Anthony Burgess’s 1978 novel 1985 gives the impression that not only the Iranian Revolution but also the power struggle between Margaret Thatcher and the trade unions had already taken place—albeit with the opposite result.1

Much more significant than Burgess’s late work, however, are two other new releases from 1978: Edward Said’s Orientalism was first published by Pantheon Books;2 and, around the same time, Marvin J. Chomsky’s miniseries Holocaust was broadcast on the television channel NBC.3 Said’s book is rightly regarded as the founding manifesto of postcolonial studies; Holocaust is a key event in the history of the impact of mass destruction. Of course, there had been minor waves of discussion of the extermination of European Jews even before it was shown—for example, in the context of the Eichmann trial in 1961 or the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial from 1963 to 1965. In the strict sense, however, remembrance of the Holocaust only began with this TV miniseries in the 1970s.

At first glance, the release of Orientalism and the broadcast of Holocaust appear to have little in common. The emergence of postcolonial studies was closely linked to the economic rise of Africa, Latin America, and Asia—the Trikont. By cutting oil production in 1973, the Arab OPEC states had confidently plunged East and West into a deep crisis; around the same time, the Asian tiger economies—South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, and Hong Kong—were taking off economically.

Postcolonialism, in other words, is not only the voice of the subaltern and the marginalized, but also an expression of the emerging self-awareness of the non-Western world. Similar to traditional European historiography, it also has the function of ideological self-assurance: where do we come from, where are we going? With its help, the catastrophes of the past are reappraised, claims on the future are historically legitimized, and, not to be forgotten, some of the negative developments of the present—dictatorship, kleptocracy, failed states—are justified by reducing them, as Axelle Kabou and George Ayittey emphasized early on,4 to the afterlife of colonialism. Beyond all the justified criticism of colonialism and global inequality, postcolonial studies are thus also accompanying ideological instruments of the competitive struggle on the world market.

The interest in the Holocaust since the late 1970s, on the other hand, was due not least to the end of the postwar boom and the first major phase of détente in the Cold War. The memory of the destruction of European Jews had been at odds with both the optimistic belief in a better future and the fear of the atomic bomb that had characterized the economic miracle of the 1950s and 1960s. Those who believe they have no tomorrow do not deal with the past, but at most with the present. When both historical optimism and the antinomian catastrophe consciousness associated with it eroded in the 1970s, the view of the past was cleared. Generational changes and the increased importance of human rights during this period did the rest.

Even if Orientalism and Holocaust seem to have little in common on superficial examination, there are links between the rise of postcolonial theory and the beginning of the period of remembrance of the Nazi mass extermination. They are at least partly connected with the almost obsessive accusations of postcolonial so-called “scholar-activists,” against the acknowledging of the unprecedented, distinctive character of the Holocaust, and against Israel. Of particular importance here is a process that I would describe as the dialectic of victimhood.

2

It is well known that until the 1970s, the memory of National Socialism and the Second World War was determined not by the Holocaust but by the events at the front or within the Maquis underground. This was certainly also due to the fact that the struggle, martyrdom, and even torture there were more comprehensible to the general public as commensurate with past experience than was extermination for its own sake. The idea of a meaningless death was almost unbearable in view of continued life after 1945.

At the same time, however, and directly related to this, the figure of the innocent, defenseless, and passive victim, which the Germans had produced by the millions, did not fit with the role model of the prudent hero, who takes his fate into his own hands in a manner that is as stoic as it is dutiful. This role model had certainly been called into question by the First World War at the latest, which, despite Ernst Jünger’s heroic tales, had nothing heroic about it. Even mass society, which may have occasionally fueled the yearning for individual heroism, demonstrated its impossibility on a daily basis: the experiences of powerlessness and humiliation that it constantly produces are the opposite of heroism. Yet because the role model of the hero had been firmly anchored in the occidental imaginative world since at least Homer, it continued to live on beyond its refutation.

This was probably one of the reasons why the story of the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was told not only by many communists, who subscribed to Progress and the Future, but also—at least in this respect not dissimilar to them—by Zionists as a heroic drama. Even Marek Edelman, one of the commanders of the uprising, initially followed this pattern. Although he always insisted that he had not changed his assessment over time,5 after the war he cultivated the combative optimism that he later repeatedly criticized. In his first memoir, Getto walczy (The Ghetto Fights), published in Warsaw by the General Jewish Labor Bund in 1945,6 he still employed some traditional, pathos-laden formulas of heroism: “Once again the fighters celebrate their second complete victory . . . . Every house is fighting.” The volume ends with the words that the fallen had “fulfilled their task to the end, to the last drop of blood.”7

The longevity of such heroism, as expressed in these words, was soon to be met with the historical optimism of the first postwar decades. On both sides of the Iron Curtain, the life-supporting measures consisted of full employment, technological progress, and mass consumption. They were merely weighted differently in the East and West—and were incorporated into different ideological images. In the Soviet sphere of influence, there was the socialist hero, who could be called Ernst Thälmann, Yuri Gagarin, or Imre Muszka; in the West, it was the self-made man, who in the 1950s and 1960s often wore a cowboy hat and rode off into the sunset on the cinema screen.

Yet the sense of impending doom that accompanied the optimism for the future like a shadow—remember the atomic bomb—was also reflected in art and the culture industry: recall the theater of the absurd or film noir. Even so, traditional heroic concepts can occasionally be found there as well. Even the central slogan of convalescent heroism comes from one of the darkest Westerns of the time. In High Noon (1952), Fred Zinnemann and Carl Foreman put those famous words into the mouth of their actor Gary Cooper, which soon became a familiar catchphrase: “A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.” The silent hero remained both a cultural icon and a forward-looking role model.

In contrast to the hero, the figure of the innocent and defenseless victim—the “victimus,” as it is called in Latin, in contrast to the “sacrifare” of the voluntary sacrifice—was long frowned upon. This also applies to Israel, where hundreds of thousands of persecuted people had found a new home. This is one of the reasons why the appearance of Yehil De-Nur, a survivor of Auschwitz, during the Eichmann trial in the Jewish state in 1961, evoked not only compassion but also shame. De-Nur, who had written some of the first books about the Holocaust under the pseudonym Ka-Tzetnik 135633, broke down during his testimony in court. His daughter remembers that since then she has been regarded everywhere as “the daughter of the fainter.”8

The collective shame sparked by De-Nur’s collapse certainly had a distinctly Israeli dimension as well. It should be understood not least against the background of the efforts at demarcation from the galut [exile] that characterized the young state: for many of its intellectual leaders, Zionism was a counter-image to the supposed weakness of Diaspora. At the same time, however, the unease that accompanied the powerlessness of the witness was part of the general distance from victims that was cultivated during this period.

As the work of historian Svenja Goltermann has shown, the image of the innocent and passive victim only began to emerge in the late nineteenth century.9 Its emergence was due in no small part to attempts to “civilize” war and to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate violence. Nevertheless, the figure of the victim was associated with shame well into the second half of the twentieth century; victims were met with reservations. They were regularly blamed for their own suffering, sometimes through their own actions, sometimes through certain mental dispositions.

3

This changed at the turn of the 1970s. During this period, social role models changed, as Christopher Lasch pointed out long ago.10 There were many reasons for this, too. Initially, they had little to do with the memory of the Holocaust. A central role was instead attributed to the end of Fordism, as the long-dominant production regime of standardized assembly line production, mass consumption, and social welfare is often called. Its decline, which had been emerging since the late 1970s, was closely linked to the transformation of industrial societies into service societies. The hard-working industrial worker, whose iconography incorporated at least some residues of classical heroic representations, was disappearing, at least as a general trend.

Moreover, other developments contributed to the changing perception of heroes and victims. The oil crises of 1973 and 1979 pushed economically driven historical optimism, which had shaped the postwar decades alongside the atomic bomb, to its limits. As a result, the Western notion of the self-made man eroded, as did the image of the socialist hero. Since the 1970s, no new heroic role models or figures of identification have emerged east of the Iron Curtain, as had been the case in previous decades. The “end of the grand narratives” that Jean-François Lyotard spoke of around the same time took care of the rest.11

With all these changes, the figure of the hero certainly did not completely disappear from the public sphere. As a cultural icon, it continues to be present, albeit often caricatured or “taken ironically,” as the saying goes. The victim itself also did not become a social role model, as is occasionally claimed. Nevertheless, the dual turn from stoicism to sensitivity and from silence to cathartic communication, which took place during this period, contributed to a stronger interest in experiences of suffering and their evaluation. As Peter Novick pointed out a few years ago, society’s relationship to victims has shifted: “the cultural icon of the strong, silent hero is replaced by the vulnerable and verbose antihero. Instead of enduring in silence, one lets it all hang out. The voicing of pain and outrage is alleged to be ‘empowering’ as well as therapeutic.”12

It was also against this background that the questions raised earlier by some American, European, and Israeli psychiatrists about the long-term effects of experiences of violence soon received more attention; this is another reason why veterans of the Vietnam War, unlike the GIs who had fought in Korea only twenty years earlier, came together in self-help groups to fight against medical and social prejudice against victims. In 1977, a year before the first broadcast of Holocaust, post-traumatic stress disorder was mentioned for the first time—a diagnosis that did not exist before.

The fields of law and criminology also turned more to the victims than before. While the young branch of victimology, a subfield of criminology, was still being denounced as a “fad” in the 1960s,13 it rose to become an internationally recognized discipline in the following decade. In September 1973, shortly before the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War, the “First International Symposium on Victimology” took place in Jerusalem; congresses in Boston and Münster followed. In 1979, the year in which Holocaust was first shown in the Federal Republic of Germany and Austria, the World Society of Victimology was founded, and it still exists today.

It was not least due to this increase in the social significance of the victim that the Holocaust received greater attention. The extermination had long been overshadowed by the battle, but the relationship was soon reversed: while in the 1950s and 1960s even high-quality historical studies on the Second World War had sometimes made do without any mention of the Holocaust, the extermination was now sometimes told without any reference to the war, which had after all formed its context.

This also applied to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, which for a long time had been both the counter-image and the representative of the memory of the Holocaust. Since the 1970s, the number of newspaper and magazine articles published about it has decreased in both the East and the West. The books that appeared about the uprising were soon overshadowed by the almost unmanageable literature on the Holocaust. Directly related to this, the heroism in the works about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising also generally disappeared.

Hanna Krall’s literary conversations with the aging Marek Edelman, which were published at the end of the 1970s under the title Shielding the Flame, serve as a symbol and a manifesto of this development. There, the figure of the hero gets almost entirely dismantled. Edelman, who had himself narrated the uprising as a heroic drama just thirty years earlier, now refused to engage in any pathos or sensemaking. In particular, his statements about Mordechaj Anielewicz, the leader of the Jewish Combat Organization, amounted to a toppling of a monument. Edelman remembered him not as a shining hero but as a brave youth with fears, worries, mistakes, and foibles. When Krall asked him why Anielewicz had been appointed commander, he replied succinctly: “He very much wanted to be a commander, so we chose him. He was a little childlike in this ambition, but he was a talented guy, well read, full of energy.”14

In contrast to his statements in 1945, Edelman now seemed to admire the insurgents less than those who were deported to the extermination camps. “It’s terrible when someone goes to their death so calmly,” he explained, referring to the tens of thousands who had gathered at the Umschlagplatz holding area around the ghetto’s train station during the so-called liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943. “It’s harder than any shooting, it’s much easier to die shooting. How much easier it seemed for us to die than for the people who had to get into the cattle wagon, go on this journey, dig their grave, undress stark naked.”15 In short, as interest in the experiences of victims grew, contributing to a greater awareness of the Holocaust, extermination took precedence over fighting.

4

This increased significance of the social figure of the victim also contributes to the emergence of postcolonialism, at least in part. The anti-colonialism inherited by postcolonialism and the memory of decolonization in the young nation-states of the 1950s and 1960s were also primarily oriented toward heroic narratives. The best example is Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 The Battle of Algiers, a film that depicts events from the Algerian War of Independence. It is much better than some of its fans might suggest: Andreas Baader, co-founder of the German left-wing terrorist group Red Army Faction, is said to have considered The Battle of Algiers his favorite film; Edward Said called it among “the two greatest political films ever made.”16

Even though The Battle of Algiers was financed by Algeria, it is not a propaganda film. Despite his sympathies for the FLN, Pontecorvo endeavored to “be fair to both sides,” as a film critic once wrote.17 The Battle of Algiers also shows the excesses of the FLN, the Algerian National Liberation Front, including the well-known bomb attack on a café in the European-influenced part of Algiers in July 1957, in which eleven civilians were murdered.

Nevertheless, Pontecorvo concentrated on the exchange of blows between the two warring parties, France and the FLN. If he gave greater space to victims, it was not the defenseless and innocent “victimus” but the voluntary self-sacrifice of the “sacrifare”: shortly before the end of the film, one of the heroes, Ali La Pointe, together with other FLN members, refuses to surrender. They do not want to leave the hideout to which they have retreated. As a result, the house where the hideout is located is blown up. La Pointe and his comrades-in-arms, among them a child, appear as fighters and martyrs. The film ends with stirring crowd scenes that are aimed toward the future.

Although the concept of martyrdom also became part of postcolonialism, in contrast to anti-colonialism it is based less on a hero narrative than on a victim narrative. As a result of the rise of the social figure of the victim, not only the persecution and extermination of the European Jews but also other experiences of suffering and persecution have received more attention since the 1970s than before. Even before Marvin J. Chomsky’s series Holocaust was shown on television in 1978, the director had already brought Roots, a multipart series about the enslavement of blacks, to market in 1977. It won some of the most coveted television prizes in the United States, including nine Emmy Awards, a Golden Globe, and the Peabody Award. Concomitantly, for the first time, there were widespread calls to recognize the persecution and murder of Sinti and Roma under National Socialism as genocide. Other minorities also demanded recognition of their suffering.

Closely related to this, collective self-images also changed. Until the 1970s, they were often modeled primarily, though never exclusively, on the nation-building of the nineteenth century. In other words, they were mediated by heroic founding events: the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest, the Glorious Revolution, George Washington’s crossing of the Delaware. However, experiences of discrimination, persecution, and exclusion also gained greater importance even here as a result of the changed perception of the figure of the victim. Ever since, some nations have also seen themselves more strongly than before as emerging from a founding catastrophe: “the Armenians on the 1915 genocide, Ireland on the Great Famine from 1845 and 1852, Ukraine on the Holodomor . . . Rwanda on the extermination of the Tutsis.”18

In the course of the socioeconomic and cultural developments of recent decades, this process has both accelerated and intensified, both collectively and individually. The figure of the victim has become universalized. In other words, while claims of victimization were previously often a part of one’s self-understanding, they now frequently became central to the much-discussed “identity”—a fashionable term in political and social science that also became popular in the 1970s.

5

It is these self-understandings or “identities” mediated through the figure of the victim that are challenged by the Holocaust. This applies in many respects and at various levels. Let us first consider Edward Said’s Orientalism. In his magnum opus, Said uses the example of the Middle East to show that the Western view of this region has always been determined by a need for dominance. As evidence for this, he invokes French and British Orientalism of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in particular the work of the Islam scholar Ernest Renan.

Critics such as Bernard Lewis pointed out early on that some of Said’s central theses, especially the victim narrative, are not scientifically tenable. They were able to show that European Oriental studies were by no means exclusively hostile toward their research subject. In particular, German-speaking scholars from the Habsburg Empire, the German Empire, and their successor states approached Islam without suspicion from the end of the nineteenth century and attempted to describe it from an internal perspective. For many of them, what Lewis once wrote in a different context was true: they were among the first “to stress, to recognize, and indeed sometimes to romanticize the merits and achievements of Muslim civilization in its great days.”19 In Orientalism, these scholars are systematically left out.

There is a purpose behind this: Said’s book seeks to place Israel in the continuity of colonialism, while presenting the Palestinians as its victims. It culminates in the insinuation that the Jewish state is a central representative of today’s Orientalism.

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A look at the German role in the Arab-Islamic world would challenge Said’s theses in several ways. The Middle East was by no means only viewed as a sphere of influence by France and Great Britain, as is suggested in Orientalism. Wilhelmine Germany also maintained close relations with the region. The Weimar Republic and the Third Reich continued these relations in different ways. In particular, the National Socialist relationship with the Middle East was certainly not based solely on geostrategic plans. At least some of the leading Nazis, including the by no means insignificant Heinrich Himmler, did not so much see the Orient as the “other,” as Said suggests, but rather believed they recognized a spiritual kinship.20 Such affinities are partly what underpinned the alliance between the Third Reich, Arab nationalists, and proto-Islamists that emerged in the 1930s and was destined to have a long afterlife.

But above all, the reference to Germany’s ties to the Middle East invokes the Holocaust, which also does not fit into Said’s scheme at all. Anyone who speaks of Germany and Israel, whether they want to or not, also addresses the extermination of European Jews. This is an event that cannot appear in Said’s work even if only because it refutes the notion that Israel is a product of colonialism. The international community agreed to the founding of the Jewish state in 1948 primarily because of the Nazi mass extermination. Israel was not founded in response to pressure from the old colonial powers, but against their will. France and Great Britain did not want to worsen their complicated relationship with the Islamic world by supporting the Jewish state.

As Middle East scholar Andreas Harstel shows in the Hallische Jahrbücher in 2021,21 all of these questions are concentrated in the memory of the German-speaking scholars of Oriental studies. Many of them came from Jewish families. Among the Jews of the German Empire and the Danube Monarchy, a great interest in the Orient had developed since the nineteenth century. It was often characterized less by arrogance than by the desire to better understand the region from which the religious traditions of Judaism originated. This applies to Moritz Steinschneider as well as Ignaz Goldziher, two founders of modern Islamic studies. Both of them were among the greatest critics of Ernest Renan, whom Said names as a prime example of Orientalist thought.

The lives of the Jewish scholars also evoke the event that is not allowed to take place in Said’s work. Steinschneider and Goldziher died before the Holocaust; Max Bravmann, Paul Kraus, and others, however, emigrated from Germany after the transfer of power to Hitler. Kraus was given a job in Cairo but lost it again in 1944 due to increasing antisemitism in Egypt. As his hopes for a new position in Jerusalem were not fulfilled, he committed suicide.

Said has to omit these experiences and overemphasize the influence of France and Great Britain because this is the only way to portray Israel as a product of Western supremacist thought, which turns the Arabs into victims. Orientalism, as Andreas Harstel puts it, is a “polemical pamphlet [Kampfschrift] transposed into academia.”22

Even without going that far, it is hard to overlook the fact that the book targets the delegitimization of Israel, at least in its subtext. In his book The Question of Palestine, which was published one year after Orientalism,23 Said himself ultimately placed his academic work in the context of his political engagement against Israel. Through both texts, the theoretical and the political manifesto, the affective investment in the Jewish state inscribes itself into postcolonial theory—albeit only in passing.

6

But even beyond the Middle East, the self-understandings or “identities” that are conveyed through the figure of the victim are challenged by the annihilation of the European Jews. Said’s unease in dealing with the Holocaust can be seen as part of a larger structure of defensiveness and resentment. Due to the existential horror that emanates from the mass extermination, it is linked to a narcissistic injury. It goes far beyond the “Question of Palestine” that Said is talking about. This injury is directly related to the distinctive nature of the Holocaust itself. The great crimes with which humanity was confronted before the extermination of the European Jews were all expressions of instrumental reason, which Max Horkheimer first discussed in the 1940s.24 In this view, humans and nature are considered solely from the point of view of utility—and for this reason, among others, it sometimes veers into the irrational. Even the most horrific massacres of the colonial campaigns, however close they may have come to the crimes of National Socialism, and the “blood pump” of the First World War were still to some extent connected with the pursuit of power, influence, sales markets, increased prestige, or, not to be underestimated, gains in pleasure.

Not so the Holocaust: the annihilation of the European Jews was not the ultimate extension of the boundaries of instrumental reason, but rather a transgression of them. The indiscriminate extermination of women, men, children, and the elderly, anywhere in the world, regardless of whether they were unruly or willing to cooperate, able to work or infirm, essential to the war effort or not, can no longer be grasped by the categories of instrumental reason. On the whole, the Holocaust had nothing to do with the pursuit of power, influence, markets, prestige, or even pleasure. Instead, it was aimed at redemption, a notion that was only incompletely transferred from the sacred to the secular. The historian Saul Friedländer therefore also speaks of National Socialism’s “redemptive antisemitism.”25

The drive for redemption and annihilation went so far as to eliminate the perpetrators’ own sense of self-preservation: Jewish forced laborers who had been classified as essential to the war effort were deported from the workbench to be murdered; the railway cars used to transport Jews to Auschwitz, even from the most remote Greek islands, were needed by the Wehrmacht for supplies. This elimination of the collective self-preservation instinct of the perpetrators was something completely new.26

This particularity of the Holocaust has far-reaching consequences for the relationship to other genocidal events. For to the extent that the Holocaust went beyond the boundaries of instrumental reason, not pushing them to the extreme but rather breaking them, it eclipsed other mass crimes—not morally, of course, but epistemically. “Jewish suffering has become the benchmark, and the Shoah the founding event,” as the nouveau philosophe Pascal Bruckner once put it.27 The Jews became the epitome of the victim.

This triggers resentment and covetousness, especially in view of the fact that the social figure of the victim has assumed an ever greater significance in collective self-images. A few years ago, Peter Novick spoke of “Holocaust envy” and Edward Alexander of an attempt at “stealing the Holocaust.”28 In view of the limited public attention, the need to have one’s own suffering recognized, and probably also the limited financial resources made officially available for compensation, a double urge has arisen. On the one hand, it aims to minimize the dimensions of the Holocaust and, on the other, to bring the victims’ own experiences closer to the Holocaust. This is done not least by translating one’s own suffering into the language of the extermination of the Jews—for example, when the partition of British India in 1947, which was associated with millions of expulsions and hundreds of thousands of deaths, is termed in a popular book “Bengal’s Hindu Holocaust,” or when Israel is accused of “fifty Holocausts” against the Palestinians, as Mahmoud Abbas did some time ago during his appearance at the German Federal Chancellery.29

This double urge is reinforced by one of the basic assumptions of postcolonialism. It goes back to W.E.B. Du Bois, probably the most important civil rights activist in the United States. At the first Pan-African Conference in London in July 1900, the sociologist, historian, and philosopher declared that the central “problem of the twentieth century” was the “problem of the color line,” the boundary between skin colors.30 As he later explained, during his travels through Europe he became familiar with the social question, discrimination against Poles in the eastern territories of the German Empire, and antisemitism.31

Yet for many postcolonial “scholars and activists,” the “color line” remains the central axis of conflict in world history, even more than fifty years after Du Bois’s death. This notion is also put into question by the Holocaust. The European Jews were not murdered because of their skin color; the crime of the century cannot be explained by references to the “color line” that was declared the central conflict of the century. This also results in both the postcolonial attempts to relativize the Holocaust and the questionable efforts to still classify the crime according to the color scale. Some postcolonial thinkers go so far as to identify Jews as “people of color” who only became “white” after their rise to the middle classes. Others try to establish the founding of Israel as the turning point from Jewish “blackness” to its “whiteness.” Empirical evidence is adjusted to fit the theory.

7

And now I come to my main point: the epistemic particularity of Jewish victimhood and the associated difficulty of categorizing the Holocaust on the basis of the “color line” bring older tones of resentment to the fore. They touch on deep-seated motifs of the collective unconscious. If we are to believe Freud, antisemitism also has roots in the history of religion. As David Nirenberg’s major study on the emergence of hostility toward Jews also suggests,32 these roots go back to the formative phase of monotheism.

The primitive accumulation of antisemitism is not least related to the theologically controversial question of whether the Jews are the chosen people of God. “I venture to assert,” Freud wrote in 1939 in Moses and Monotheism, “that the jealousy which the Jews evoked in the other peoples by maintaining that they were the first-born, favourite child of God the Father has not yet been overcome by those others, just as if the latter had given credence to the assumption.”33 The hatred, resentment, and accusations that historically resulted from this regularly revolved around the demarcation from other religions, the refusal to accept conversion, and the—often only recently imposed—renunciation of missionary work: in other words, the seemingly particularistic aspects of Judaism.

Wrapped in contemporary notions of “universalism” and “particularity,” “homogeneity” and “difference,” some of these motifs have survived into the present day. This applies not least when the corresponding theories are impregnated with Islam or, as in the case of Edward Said or Achille Mbembe, a former student of the Dominicans, with Christianity. Mbembe, among others, argues that while Judaism is a religion of “exclusivism” and a “logic of closure,” Christianity has endeavored to “transcend exclusion,” to abolish the “distinction between Jews and Gentiles,” and to declare “any exclusion based on ethnic origin meaningless.”34 The religious prejudice lingers on. Through the Holocaust, the theological notion of God’s chosen people was eventually negatively transferred into the sphere of the material world. The Jews were horrifically singled out: they became, as Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno bitterly commented in Dialectic of Enlightenment, truly “the chosen people.”35

It almost seems as if this has also doubled the traditional resentment of the seemingly particularistic components of Judaism, the envy and jealousy of its supposed peculiarity. Paradoxically, the Holocaust became the catalyst of the old and the source of a new hostility toward Jews—an antisemitism not only despite but also because of Auschwitz. This is another reason why the viewpoint on the Holocaust and Israel, which was founded not least as a reaction to the mass extermination, is often just as limited as it is rigid; this is also why the zeal, the desires, and the successes of the propaganda that emanates from them are so great: new resentments encounter old idiosyncrasies and mutually reinforce each other. This is another reason for the limits of enlightenment, as described by Adorno and Horkheimer in the Dialectic of Enlightenment.36

8

I will conclude with a summary. The developments we are currently experiencing certainly have many causes. Yet they also stem from many changes in social values and role models. Despite all the historical accusations, the silent hero was a social role model for the future until well after the Second World War, but in the 1970s it fell into crisis. This created a greater interest in the experiences of victims, discrimination, and marginalization, which until then had not only been overshadowed by individual and collective heroic narratives but had also often been frowned upon.

The decline in the significance of the hero initially had little to do with the Holocaust or the end of colonialism in its manifest form. It was rather due to the economic, political, and sociocultural changes brought about by the upheavals of the 1970s. Just as the retreat of the social figure of the hero suddenly created space for the articulation of victim experiences, this space also offered the opportunity to engage more intensively with the Holocaust than before. The same applies to other mass crimes. That Marvin J. Chomsky’s Holocaust premiered in the same year as Edward Said’s Orientalism was surely a coincidence. Yet the two works belong to the same historical context, however different or even contrary they may be.

Today, the interest in victims and the experience of being victimized has become universal, more than forty years after the first broadcast of the television series and the publication of the book. As I have tried to show, this is due not least to the change in self-images and role models that was directly linked to the hero’s retreat. While for a long time they had often been imbued primarily with heroism, since the 1970s experiences of exclusion and discrimination have also acquired a much greater significance for individual and collective self-understanding than before. The talk of “identity” that emerged during this period, as well as the at least partial retreat of universalism, did the rest: they stand for a growing interest in self-localization.

The interpretative struggles that have been waged for several years around the relationship between National Socialism and colonialism, as well as the sometimes surprising approval that postcolonial relativizations of the Holocaust have received, suggest that we are currently experiencing the beginning of the end of the history of Holocaust memory. This history of Holocaust memory began, strictly speaking, with the social significance of the figure of the victim; its end is not least (but also here: by no means exclusively) related to its dialectic. It results from a process of reversal. Or to put it another way, the current erosion of the memory of the Holocaust and the realization of its epistemic dimensions is, paradoxically, the result of a development to which it owes its emergence from the shadow of the memory of the war and of its resistance in the first place.

Jan Gerber is a historian and political scientist. He heads the “Politics” research department at the Leibniz Institute for Jewish History and Culture – Simon Dubnow (Dubnow Institute) in Leipzig and is an honorary professor of modern and contemporary history with a focus on modern Jewish history at the University of Leipzig. His latest publications include “Late Stalinist Antisemitism: An Approach to the 1952 Slánský Trial in Prague,” Center for Antisemitism and Racism Studies Working Papers 022; and “National Socialism and Colonialism: The Barbie Trial as a Primal Scene of Competing Memories,” in On the Critique of Identity, ed. Ivo Ritzer (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 2025), pp. 137–54. He also edited the volume Die Untiefen des Postkolonialismus, Hallische Jahrbücher, no. 1 (Berlin: Edition Tiamat, 2021). This summer, Edition Tiamat will publish a book by him on the changes in the memory of the Holocaust.

Topics: Israel Initiative • TPPI Translations

ASA President - Adia Harvey Wingfield

ASA President-Elect - Shelley J. Correll

ASA Vice President - Allison J. Pugh

ASA Vice President-Elect - Victor Ray

ASA Secretary-Treasurer - Monica McDermott

Dear ASA Colleagues,

I have decided not to renew my membership in the American Sociological Association. Now that the ASA has endorsed the S4P [Sociologists for Palestine] resolution, I am embarrassed to be associated with my professional organization.

My specific objections to this resolution are:

1. Because it does not mention the hostages, the ASA resolution on Palestine has implicitly endorsed hostage taking, murder, and rape as legitimate strategies for social change.

2. The rambling paragraph about indigenous nations implies that Jews are not indigenous to the Levant, ignoring decades of scholarship in history, biblical studies, archaeology, and even DNA-based population research. Evidence, apparently, is no longer a desideratum of our professional association.

3. The S4P resolution, with no skepticism or questions, accepts the fatality numbers reported by Hamas. Even the UN has acknowledged these are problematic at best. Apparently methodological rigor is no longer a pillar of the discipline.

4. The resolution dismisses antisemitism as a legitimate concern, despite extensive research documenting its resurgence. In his S4P teach-in, Michael Burawoy even warns Jews that they themselves are responsible are increasing antisemitism by supporting Israel. This is itself a classic strategy of Jew-hatred.

5. The S4P resolution has now committed ASA to opposing “the Zionist occupation” of Palestine. To what does this refer? To the West Bank? To Israel itself? Should this opposition be pursued “by any means necessary”? This vague language can easily be interpreted to imply that the ASA has joined Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis in calling for the annihilation of the Jewish state. Sociology has apparently turned its back on precision.

6. In retrospect the events following the ASA resolution show it to be embarrassingly simple-minded:

   1. Both UNWRA and World Central Kitchen have admitted that some of their staff were Hamas members and even participated in the atrocities of October 7.

   2. Hamas documents captured in Gaza explicitly spell out a strategy of manipulating individuals and organizations (e.g., the ASA) in the West to pressure Israel on their behalf. Anthony Blinken himself lamented that the lack of pressure on Hamas has made it all but impossible to implement a hostage release deal and ceasefire. The latter (though not the former, interestingly) were the explicit goals of the ASA resolution.

   3. Hamas documents captured in Gaza explicitly spell out a strategy of sacrificing civilian lives to create anti-Israel sentiment.

   4. The ASA has not addressed the actual genocide taking place in Sudan, nor has it ever addressed the brutality of the Assad regime in Syria that is finally on the front page. Apparently only conflicts involving Israel are of interest to American sociologists.

   5. Violent antisemitism has increased exponentially over the past year. The ASA resolution dismisses concern about antisemitism, and this appears to be the ASA position now.

7. Finally, former ASA president Michael Burawoy, in his “teach-in” on the S4P website, declares that “[only] sociologists care what sociologists think and do.” Why support an organization that embraces its own irrelevance?

My own field, sociology of religion, is virtually non-existent in the ASA, and my academic homes are the SSSR, RRA, and ASR. Nonetheless, I have renewed my membership for the past 49 years to support my professional organization along with multiple sections at over $500/year. My support of ASA has been a charitable contribution, and I will be contributing my ASA dues to other causes.

If you got this far, thank you for hearing me out.

Bruce A. Phillips, PhD, Member #11169

Topics: Israel Initiative

Part 1 of this essay appears here.

One does not have to be a close follower of Israeli politics to know that Benjamin Netanyahu has dominated the political scene in Israel for many years. He is in fact Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, all told. His first term was just three years, 1996–1999. But he returned in 2009, and he has been in office ever since—except for an eighteen-month interregnum during the period 2021–2022.

It was during that brief respite that I first thought of Israel as offering some kind of political model for other countries. It’s counterintuitive. Israel’s political system was notoriously dysfunctional even before the chaos of 2019–2021, which saw four elections held in a two-year period. Three failed to produce a clear winner, but the fourth led to Israel’s strangest ever coalition. A collection of right, left, and center parties, including the first ever Arab-Israeli party to be part of a governing coalition. They were united by two beliefs: that the endless cycle of inconclusive elections had to end; and that Netanyahu and his refusal to bow out of politics despite facing three criminal corruption charges were to blame for this.

And this was where I thought Israel was offering a solution to a widespread political problem. Israel’s political opposition had unseated a populist leader pursuing an increasingly illiberal agenda—which I described in part 1 of this two-part essay. Also at this time, two countries where illiberal populists were firmly ensconced in power were facing elections: Turkey and Hungary. As I wrote in an essay published at the time, entitled “Israel’s Change Coalition Is a Template to Fight Populism”:

Erdoğan and Orbán have been far more successful than Netanyahu ever was in dismantling the checks and balances on executive power. Parties who disagree on much can nevertheless unite over the patriotic mission of rescuing liberal democracy. Like Israel’s Change Coalition, they can place ideology to one side and pursue ruthless pragmatism and a no-frills agenda of good governance in the national interest.

As it turned out, I was wrong and I was right.

I was wrong about Turkey and Hungary. The two incumbents won their elections—Erdoğan narrowly, Orbán handily. But I was right that other countries could follow Israel’s lead; one year later, a coalition of three diverse parties in Poland united to bring down the Orbán-inspired Law & Justice Party. Divided on many specific policy agendas, they were united by a desire to undo the damage done to the rule of law in Poland by the outgoing regime.

By this point Israel’s historic “Change Coalition” had collapsed and Netanyahu was back in the prime minister’s residence, this time with his first entirely right-wing government. A coalition in which his Likud party was partnered with two religious-nationalist parties—one of them explicitly influenced by Meir Kahane, the first Israeli politician to be banned from running for office because of his supremacist views and anti-Arab racism—and with two ultra-Orthodox parties, primarily concerned with the specific needs of their own self-ghettoized constituency. What all the parties had in common was a desire to neuter the Supreme Court, the only real check on executive power in Israel’s underdeveloped system of government. The Court’s commitment to uphold the right to “human dignity and liberty,” set out in Israel’s quasi-constitutional Basic Laws, was a threat both to the religious-nationalists’ plans to annex the West Bank and to the ultra-Orthodox insistence on an exemption from mandatory military service. Most importantly, though, the incoming justice minister from the Likud, Yariv Levin, had long sought to degrade Israel’s liberal democratic system into something resembling Hungary’s “illiberal democracy.” Ironically, given the way Poland’s opposition parties would follow Israel’s model in deposing their illiberal government, Levin and his colleagues consulted that illiberal government about how to “overhaul the judicial system.” As I discussed in part 1 of my essay, the Netanyahu of even five years prior to this government—that is, before being charged with corruption—had been a defender of the Supreme Court’s historic role of preventing a “tyranny of the majority.”

The response of Israelis to this unprecedented threat was itself unprecedented. In no other country where liberal democracy was on the line from a populist government had the public risen in protest in such numbers, with so much determination, and with so much national pride. This was a liberal-national, or “liberal patriotic,” revolt against an il-liberal regime.

But before I get to the specifics of that, a little history.

Notwithstanding the highly successful demonization campaign against Zionism, which has its origins in a deliberate, orchestrated policy of the Soviet Union in the late 1960s, the principal founding ideologues of the Zionist movement sought to establish a Jewish and democratic state.

In fact, the movement was unusually democratic from the outset. Delegates at the pre-state Zionist congresses, beginning right at the end of the nineteenth century, were democratically elected to participate, primarily from countries that were not themselves democracies, like Tsarist Russia. What’s more, women had full equality as voters and representatives at a time when women in the vast majority of the democratic states did not yet have the vote. The first Zionist Congress was in 1897. The United States did not adopt the Nineteenth Amendment to its Constitution, mandating equal voting rights for women at the state and federal level, until 1920. In Britain, it wasn’t until 1928 that women had the same full voting rights as men.

And we don’t need to guess what the founder of political Zionism, Theodore Herzl, had in mind for the Jewish state that he hoped to build, because he told us. In 1902 he wrote a novel, Altneuland, his utopian depiction of the Jewish state that the Zionist movement would create. The plotline includes an election. The Jewish state of Herzl’s imagination was a democracy, and all its citizens had the vote regardless of gender, race, or religion. In this fictional state—as in the real Israel—there is a substantial Arab minority who are citizens. Here, Herzl introduces a villain: not an Arab but a recently arrived Jewish immigrant—a Rabbi, no less—who has established a new political party calling for the disenfranchisement of its non-Jewish inhabitants. He maintains that citizenship and voting rights should be restricted to Jews in a Jewish state. If Meir Kahane—also a Rabbi, and also an immigrant—ever read Altneuland, he might have been impressed to find Herzl predicting him so directly.

In Herzl’s novel the election campaign becomes a battle for the soul of the country: Herzl’s liberal nationalism against the illiberal nationalism of this Kahanist, eighty years before Kahane. There are dramatic accounts of election rallies, in which the opposition to this racist party fights back. Eventually, the new party is beaten, the liberal nationalists win the election, and the defeated candidate is reported to be leaving the country in disgrace.

And what of Herzl’s successors in the Zionist movement? Well, they were a diverse bunch, but the two most consequential, in that they would shape the contours of the politics of the future State of Israel, were the socialist David Ben-Gurion and the classical liberal Vladimir “Ze’ev” Jabotinsky. Ben-Gurion was the principal drafter of Israel’s Declaration of Independence, which combined the Zionist raison d’être of a nation-state for the Jewish people in their historic homeland with a commitment to “complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex.”

Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding prime minister, certainly had an authoritarian streak, but when challenged by the Supreme Court, most famously in 1953 when he tried to close down the communist newspaper Kol Ha’am, he deferred to the liberal principles of the rule of law and the separation of powers.

In the case of Jabotinsky, the father of what would become the Israeli right, the commitment to liberal democracy was unequivocal. An admirer of America’s founding fathers and the system of checks and balances they established, he wrote of democracy that it “means freedom”:

Even a government of majority rule can negate freedom….These contradictors will have to be prevented. The Jewish State will have to be such, ensuring that the minority will not be rendered defenseless.

Jabotinsky’s most consequential disciple, future Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin, took this even further. As early as 1951, he advocated not just for the “rule of law” but for the “Supremacy of the Law”:

We have learned that an elected parliamentary majority can be an instrument in the hands of a group of rulers and can act as a camouflage for their tyranny. Therefore, the nation which elects representatives must also determine its rights…in order that the majority…should not negate these rights. It is possible to achieve this only through “the Supremacy of Law,” which is to say, establishing civil liberties as a “Basic Law” or “Supreme Law,” and granting authority to a panel of judges to invalidate a law which contradicts the Basic Law by contradicting civil liberties.

If Herzl prophesied Kahane and the racist far-right in Israeli politics, Begin fully predicted the danger of this incumbent government pursuing unlimited majority power.

And what was so notable about the mass protests that broke out across the country following the government’s announcement of its judicial “reform” proposals was that they were explicitly and proudly informed not by “universal” or revolutionary or postmodern values, but rather by the founding values of the state. It was not (only) that the government was offending their liberal consciences; it was abandoning the liberal standards set by the Zionist movement and the Declaration of Independence.

If you had read certain pro-government journalists, you’d have heard that the protest movement was a vehicle for unaccountable, unelected “elites” and technocrats. This found a particularly credulous audience in the United States among some conservatives, who felt that these same elites were the problem in their country. But Israel is not America. And these conservatives, like most partisans of both sides, tended to stay in their echo chamber and only read “explainers” of Israel written by government loyalists. Both in my personal interactions with conservative American friends and in reading pro-Israel conservative American publications, I would typically hear that Israel’s fifteen-strong Supreme Court is populated entirely by left-wing justices; that judicial review is wielded as a dictatorial tool to squash right-wing policies; and that the appointment system for justices is controlled by the judiciary itself. Not one of these claims is factually correct.

Today’s Supreme Court bench, currently fourteen justices, with the justice minister stalling on his constitutional duty to appoint a new chief justice, contains at least six, arguably seven, justices who would be considered right-wing by any definition that makes sense in the Israeli context—except by the new definition introduced by the government: “right-wing” means supporting Netanyahu.

Judicial review is actually exercised sparingly, far less often than in the United States for example, nor has Supreme Court intervention only been used against right-wing governments. One of the most controversial interventions was in the early nineties, when Labor prime minister Yitzhak Rabin was forced by the Court to fire his interior minister who had been charged with corruption. This dealt a huge blow to the stability of Rabin’s fragile coalition at a time when he was pursuing peace with the Palestinians.

And the appointment system is in fact designed to ensure that neither the judiciary nor elected politicians can ignore the opinions of the other. Compromise is always required. Previous right-wing justice ministers have successfully used the existing system to appoint conservative judges.

And, unlike in the United States, Israeli protestors were not bashing the founding values of the country: they were celebrating them. Neither were they drawn from a particular ideological group or supporters of a particular party. They included leftists, centrists, and liberal-rightists. It is certainly the case that “elites” were prominent (the academy loudly condemned the government’s plans), but multiple sectors of Israeli society were active in campaigning to stop the judicial “reforms.”

The same people who were leading the protest movement up to October 6, 2023, were leading the civil society effort to help the survivors and internal refugees of the Hamas pogrom after October 7. The government was shell-shocked and hopelessly inept in those first days after the atrocities. Ordinary Israelis stepped up and stepped in, organizing food, childcare, counseling, and other services. And the most active organizations were those that had been coordinating the weekly anti-government protests. They pivoted, and they utilized the resources and organizational know-how they’d developed that year for a different challenge. They made a mockery of the populists’ claim to be speaking for “the people.” They were the people. And they were there for their stricken countrymen while the prime minister was still trying to work out how he could avoid taking responsibility for the largest mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust occurring on his watch.

In the United States it can seem that the only alternative being offered to right-wing populism is liberal or, worse, “progressive” technocracy. In Israel, that is far from the case. The alternative is liberal nationalism—or liberal patriotism: combining the fundamentals of individual rights and freedoms with a strong sense of national solidarity and responsibility; a respect for pluralism with a reverence for the tradition and history that binds the Jewish people together.

As I write this, Israel is still at war. During the judicial protests, the most controversial anti-government step was taken by military reservists, especially pilots and special forces, the crème de la crème. They declared that they would not serve if they felt that the government ordering them into battle was no longer a government that upheld the founding values of the state—essentially saying that they were not prepared to risk their lives on the say-so of an illiberal regime. They were called traitors and worse by some members of the government. These “traitors” have been among the greatest Israeli heroes of the past fourteen months.

And that speaks to another difference between Israel’s liberals and so many liberals and progressives in the United States. In Israel there is close to a national consensus on the importance of military strength, and the willingness to use it. Former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak has called Israel “a villa in the jungle.” An undiplomatic metaphor, for sure, but one that speaks to Barak’s point: Israel is not exactly surrounded by friends that it needs to, or indeed can, placate. When the only way to appease an enemy is to commit suicide—very much the case with Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran—the situation requires sticks, not carrots. Barak was Israel’s last prime minister from the left. Today he is a particularly vocal and uncompromising opponent of Netanyahu and his government. But he’s no dove.

In 2023 I interviewed two legal scholars, from Hungary and Poland, respectively, who had recently visited Israel and attended the protests. Gabor Halmai told me that Israeli protesters served as “a model for Hungary. Nothing similar to this happened in my country.” Tomasz Koncewicz said that “[t]he Israelis made this intuitive assertion that following now the path blazed by Poland or Hungary of dismantling the justice system would deprive them of their rights, and undermine the very essence of their democracy….You may not have a constitution, but people feel loyal, committed, to the constitutional idea.”

More so than the short-lived “Change Government” that I had ballyhooed, it was the anti-government protests that were a model of how to confront an illiberal populist government. Populist leaders claim to represent “the people” against “the elites,” yet these terms are themselves rigged. Leaders seek to shape what is held to be “the truth,” what is “fake news,” and the identity of “the elites,” as a political strategy to achieve power. Likewise, “the people” they claim to represent is never all of the people: those who don’t support the leader are “them,” not “us.” As we’ve seen in Turkey and Hungary, this can descend into something closer to out-and-out autocracy. The purveyors of “fake news” are the enemy and so must be closed down, independent bodies like courts and cultural institutions are perverting “the popular will” and so must be brought to heel and follow the dictates of the leader. This was the fear of a huge and diverse mass of Israelis. They responded magnificently.

What could Americans take from the Israeli example of anti-populist liberal nationalism? Let’s first acknowledge that the two countries are vastly different in size, political structure, culture, and much else. Nevertheless, there are fundamentals that can be universally applied. National pride, for example—expressed not just in patriotic support for the country’s military, but in reverence for the country’s past achievements.

Donald Trump’s victory will test his political opponents these next four years. They can continue to call him a fascist—tarring as supporters of fascism all those Americans whose votes they need to win back—or they can acknowledge that vast numbers of their countrymen voted for him despite his demagoguery and disdain for liberal democratic norms, not because of them. And maybe that will lead them to ask what was so off-putting about their campaign.

The dead end of identity politics perhaps? Israelis could tell them there’s no need to dissolve the bonds of national identity to achieve equality and justice. On the contrary, liberalism works best when citizens feel a sense of kinship with one another. That’s why liberalism and nation-states arose in tandem.

Israelis relish the ethnic diversity of their country, with immigrants from every continent, but they also cherish the shared traditions and customs. Immigration was perhaps the issue of the U.S. election. But rather than asking who is for or against diversity, and labeling the latter as bigots, Democrats should consider thinking in terms of how much diversity, and in what numbers. Diversity can be a bonus for a society, but social cohesion and solidarity are critical.

And when they protest Trump’s polices, as they undoubtedly will, they should follow Israel’s model of patriotic protest. Fly the American flag. Cite the Declaration of Independence. Laud the far-sighted brilliance of the founding fathers and the majesty of the American idea; don’t fixate on their flaws and the ways in which that idea has not been lived up to. Go back sixty years to Martin Luther King, or one-hundred years to Frederick Douglass, and find American values invoked as the solution to the problem of racism, not as their root cause à la Ibram X. Kendi. More than do it: believe it.

As I write this, Israel’s justice minister is threatening to revive the judicial reform, effectively blocked for ten months by the protest movement and then frozen since October 7, 2023. His cabinet colleague, Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi, recently said the quiet part out loud in leaked remarks, starkly declaring the government’s majoritarian philosophy: “We are elected by the public; we can change the regime if we want to.” Elected, yes. But the coalition’s approval ratings dropped within weeks of the judicial reform being announced, and since October 7, even accounting for a burst of popular enthusiasm after the dramatically successful strikes against Hezbollah, they have been nowhere near a majority in the polls.

If the government does indeed renew its legislative assault on liberal democracy, it will be a declaration of war on a population that has largely rejected it. And the Israeli population has shown that it is ready, like no other, for a liberal and patriotic fight against populism.

Topics: Israel Initiative

Paul Gross is a Senior Fellow at the Menachem Begin Heritage Center in Jerusalem, but he is writing here in a personal capacity. Previously, Gross served as speechwriter for Israel’s Ambassador to the UK. He holds an MA in Middle East Politics from the University of London, and lectures widely on Israeli history and politics. His numerous published research articles and op-eds have appeared in a variety of media outlets in Israel, the UK, the US and Canada, including the Jerusalem Post, Haaretz, Fathom, The American Interest, and Persuasion. He was an active participant in the protest movement against judicial reform in Israel from December 2022 to October 2023. Gross appeared on the TPPI Podcast with Gabriel Noah Brahm last year.

The following essay originally appeared in German as “Die roten Hände: Antisemitismus mit menschlichem Antlitz” in the anthology Siebter Oktober Dreiundzwanzig: Antizionismus und Identitätspolitik, ed Vojin Saša Vukadinović (Berlin: Querverlag, 2024). Translated by Julius Bielek and Niels Betori Diehl.

The still perceivable, albeit somewhat dusty sublimity of a certain conceptual art from the 1960s and 1970s stems from its abstention from any political symbolism. Whoever comes across the sculptural work Variations of Incomplete Open Cubes (1974) by Sol LeWitt (1928–2007), who coined the term “conceptual art,” is confronted with a logically systematized sequence of 122 open cubes, which, by avoiding identical repetitions, consistently takes into account and plays through all configurations. In this consistency also lies the key to the work’s interpretation. An unambiguous reading, as is expected in today’s attention economy, is not provided. “Irrational thoughts should be followed absolutely and logically,”1 states one of LeWitt’s “Sentences on Conceptual Art” from 1969, a fundamental art-theoretical text. In her essay “LeWitt in Progress” (1978), art historian Rosalind Krauss has identified the subversive element in LeWitt’s relentless commitment to an idea, reading his work through Samuel Beckett. It is precisely this consistency that turns against the “purposelessness of purpose,”2 according to Krauss, while the act of thinking things through to the end reveals itself as a joyful farce. Conceptual art as a humoresque. Land art pioneer Robert Smithson, as the thoroughly humorless nature boy that he was, once described LeWitt’s works as “prisons devoid of reason,”3 a comment that should be taken as a compliment. Chuckling while contemplating his open cubes means understanding them.

Like the disappearance of the fireflies, which Pier Paolo Pasolini used as a metaphor for the transition from agrarian values to the “hedonistic fascism” of modern-day Italy in a 1975 article for the Corriere della Sera newspaper, the dying down of this blissful enjoyment is the measure of the dreadfulness of our time. It is a time of aversion to the imaginative and the ambiguous, an aversion that we find sublimated in the queer movement’s normalized ideas of otherness: to each penchant its own flag. In their 1950 study The Authoritarian Personality, based on Erich Fromm’s research work, Theodor W. Adorno and his co-authors described this reflex as “anti-intraception” and included it as a variable in the “fascism scale” they developed.4 As Marxist Jewish intellectuals who had emigrated from Germany to the United States during the Nazi era and were trying to apply social scientific methods to the task of identifying the causes of the turn toward authoritarianism and antisemitism, they located the authoritarian character on the right—and on the right only. The limits of a critique of ideology that set out from ideology—Marxism—to uncover ideological motives in society are easy to recognize, especially in view of Adorno’s earlier strategic silence on Stalin’s suppression of the Left Opposition and on the Moscow Trials of the late 1930s. To this day, this significant structural flaw makes recourse to the authoritarian character a useful club with which to beat down on any conservative impulse, although for instance Else Frenkel-Brunswik’s concept of intolerance of ambiguity,5 that is, the inability to tolerate uncertainties and contradictions, lends itself perfectly to clearly identifying the woke, identitarian left, with its moralizing, discourse-averse, and discrediting posture, as authoritarian and inevitably antisemitic.

Reading Adorno, one can almost forget that he happened to be a Marxist, albeit one who, with the drying up of revolutionary labor movements and the fading of any hope for the possibility of a “true” socialism in the Soviet Union, gradually rejected the notion of class analysis. Had he not insisted on going hiking in Zermatt in the summer of 1969, he might have avoided death by exhaustion, and the conservatism immanent in his incomparably sharp descriptions of experiences of loss might have emerged more clearly in his work in the following decades—let us just imagine Adorno’s writings of the 1980s! “From a distance, the differences between the Viennese workshops and the Bauhaus are no longer so considerable,” writes Adorno in Minima Moralia: “In the meantime, the curves of the pure purposive form have become independent of their function and pass over into ornaments, just like the basic shapes of Cubism.”6 Compare this with the critique of consumerism by the modernist traditionalist and pioneer of architectural postmodernism Adolf Loos, from his 1908 manifesto “Ornament and Crime”: “The turnover of ornaments leads to a premature devaluation of the product of labor. . . . A woman’s ball gown, meant only for one night, will change its form more quickly than a writing desk. But woe betide if a desk has to be changed as quickly as a ball gown, because the old forms have become unbearable.”7

If only one could edit out the Marxist trappings, which, like a compulsory exercise in Adorno’s work, make his reflections appear shallow and, at times, prosaic! Adorno’s greatness lies precisely in the fact that one can reflect with him on the damaged life even without necessarily confining the cause of the damage to capital and consumption.

The Percolation of the Postcolonial

Out of sheer necessity and in order to counteract the aesthetic exhaustion of our time described by Adorno and Loos, which no one seems to be able to address today, a method has been established in art of methodically charging artworks with politics. The old, tried-and-tested artistic strategies serve at best as visual bait, while the pseudo-progressive obsession with identity-political concerns and increasingly marginal or entirely imaginary grievances lends a work the necessary gravitas that it is no longer able to generate as art as such because any ambivalence is immediately branded as reactionary. L’art pour l’art! No verdict sounds more devastating today.

An artist like Santiago Sierra, whose career began in the mid-1990s, still consciously employs art historical references with refreshing boldness and delivers messages that come across as downright down-to-earth Marxist: Sierra’s quoting of the aesthetic formulas of early conceptual art is blatantly obvious, from the technical sobriety of the titles to the black-and-white documentation of his performance works, while thematically he works his way through exploitation and class conflict again and again. The stark contrast between people who watch and people who work, however, can be experienced sensually in Sierra’s work without having to embrace his political convictions en bloc: For 160 cm line tattooed on 4 people (2000), Sierra hired four heroin-addicted prostitutes to have a continuous line tattooed on their backs, one next to the other, for the price of a fix; for 7 forms measuring 600 x 60 x 60 cm, constructed to be held horizontal to a wall (2010), Sierra recruited 28 temporary workers through an agency to have them carry seven black minimalist blocks on their shoulders for a minimum wage, in reference to the caryatids of classical architecture.

The absolute primacy of the idea, as celebrated by Sol LeWitt, is nowadays completely historicized and inaccessible as an artistic practice. Yet even the critical realism of an artist like Santiago Sierra is at best disparaged, if not vehemently rejected as morally offensive. When the Spanish artist tried to join the postcolonialist game at the Dark Mofo festival in Tasmania in 2021, the outcry was huge. For his work Union Flag, he intended to use Instagram and Facebook to call for voluntary donations—“WE WANT YOUR BLOOD”—to obtain blood from Tasmanian Aborigines in which to then soak a British flag.

The festival’s creative director, Leigh Carmichael, gave in to the pressure of protests and canceled the work, and the private collector and founder of the hosting Mona museum, David Walsh, apologized publicly. The chairman of the Aboriginal Land Council of Tasmania, Michael Mansell, however, defended Union Flag and demanded that it be exhibited.8 Obviously, Carmichael and Walsh are white, while Mansell is Aboriginal, and, obviously, Mansell’s wish was not granted. The hyperventilating of the professional-managerial class, which always kicks in when minorities are considered to be at risk, and the composure of those supposedly affected have by now turned into a running gag, into material for memes. But even if Sierra’s kitschy gesture, with which he intended to shift the focus from the omnipresent discourse on racism to extraction as a capitalist economic model in colonialism, had passed censorship, it would have to be regarded as a rule-confirming exception: artists who deal with “social reality,” and thus express themselves politically in an explicit way, are not just somehow compelled, like Sierra, to “keep up with the times” and take up issues of identity politics, but must always do so in awareness of their own positioning. If one wants to talk about exploitation, one must of course talk about the exploitation of minorities. The white working class, on the other hand, the deplorables, are to be ignored at the very least. If artists belong to a supposedly oppressed minority, this circumstance confers authority on them. Their work is then above and beyond any criticism in terms of content, unless the critic belongs to an officially even more oppressed minority.

After decades in which postcolonial theory percolated into every pore of the art scene and in accordance with intersectionality—that is, the analysis of the intersection and overlapping of various forms of discrimination that lead to the constitution of a hierarchy of the oppressed—the white artist is left with no other role than that of the remorseful penitent, or that of the zealous “ally.”

Cocaine and the KGB

And it was precisely a hundred of these types that were sitting on the cold stone floor of the University of the Arts (UdK) in Berlin on November 13, 2023, holding up their palms, which were neatly painted with blood-red paint, in solidarity with a “people” that never existed. Or, as Hamas’s former interior minister Fathi Hamad put it in 2012: “Allah be praised, we all have Arab roots. . . . Brothers, half of the Palestinians are Egyptians and the other half are Saudis.”9

The desire for a Palestinian state is largely a Soviet invention. The drafting of the PLO Charter in 1964 in Moscow goes back to a time when the Soviet Union was interested in creating so-called “people’s liberation fronts” that would serve as centers of Marxist indoctrination and anti-capitalist opposition. The KGB created the PLO, financed it, trained its terrorists, and supplied them with weapons—with the aim of undermining Israel as the only representative of the democratic West in the Middle East. That same year, the KGB also founded the Bolivian National Liberation Army, led by Ernesto “Che” Guevara, and, in 1965, the Colombian National Liberation Army. Article 24 of the original charter states that no “regional sovereignty” would be exercised by the PLO over the West Bank or the Gaza Strip: the imaginary “Palestine” claimed by the PLO from its inception extends over the entire territory of Israel. According to the memoirs of the late Ion Mihai Pacepa (1928–2021), the former personal security adviser to the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu and a high-ranking defector, Yasser Arafat’s sole aim was always that of destroying Israel.10 And how could it have been otherwise, since Arafat was the direct successor of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini (c. 1895–1974), who met with Adolf Hitler in Berlin in 1941 to discuss the final solution of the Jewish question. In a conversation documented in photographs, as was al-Husseini’s visit to a concentration camp, Hitler assured him that one of Germany’s goals was the extermination of the Jews residing in the Arab world under British protection. He hoped that Germany would soon be able to open “the Caucasian gate to the Middle East.” For Hitler, al-Husseini11 became the most important non-European sidekick in the Middle East, and he played a crucial role in the spread of antisemitism in the Arab world.

The Kremlin provided Arafat with prominent advisors. Ceauşescu was supposed to help polish up his image and to contribute to his moderation for strategic reasons. We have knowledge of the tenor of Ceauşescu’s manipulative efforts at persuading Arafat from Pacepa’s 1987 tell-all book Red Horizons. “How about pretending to break with terrorism?” he suggests, “pretending over and over”: “The West would love it.”12 Then he starts philosophizing: “Dialectical materialism works like cocaine, let’s say. If you sniff it once or twice, it may not change your life. If you use it day after day, though, it will make you into an addict, a different man. That’s the qualitative transformation.” Arafat replies: “A snort of a pacifist Arafat day after day . . . ?”13 And Ceauşescu answers: “Exactly, Brother Yasser. The West may even become addicted to you and your PLO.”14

General Võ Nguyên Giáp, a close associate of Hồ Chí Minh and a master of Communist organizational techniques and propaganda in the Vietnam War, advised Arafat to “stop talking about annihilating Israel and instead turn [his] terror war into a struggle for human rights”—so that he would “have the American people eating out of [his] hand.”15 This had proven successful in Vietnam, where the reframing of the conflict between socialism and capitalism as a struggle for the freedom of an “indigenous” population had successfully turned Westerners against the war.

Similar advice was given to Arafat by Mhamed Yazid, Minister of Information in two Algerian wartime governments. He recommended distracting from Israel’s status as a small country, whose existence was threatened by the Arab states, by presenting Palestinian hostility as a struggle for liberation. The Arabs would then take on the role of an existentially oppressed people, set against not only the Zionists but the whole of world imperialism.16

In 1975, the Soviet Union pushed for the adoption of UN Resolution 3379 on the “Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination,” which designated Zionism as a form of racism and placed Israel in the same category as South Africa and Rhodesia.17 Proto-antiracism, Soviet-style. A year earlier, in 1974, Arafat had adopted the same academic vocabulary of the radical American left of his time in his famous olive-branch-and-gun speech at the United Nations, which the unsuspecting UdK students were in turn regurgitating with their “Condemn Genocide” and “Stop Colonialism” chants.18 He called Israel a “Zionist entity,” that is, an illegitimate state, and declared Zionism to be an “ideology that is imperialist, colonialist, racist,” that is “profoundly reactionary and discriminatory,” and that should be equated—and here comes the twist that is still popular today—with antisemitism, like “another side of the same base coin.”19

Published in Russia as early as the beginning of the twentieth century, the antisemitic pamphlet The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which purported to reveal the plans of conspiring Jews and reinterpreted antisemitism as a Jewish strategy to maintain their power, continues to be influential in the Middle East, especially in academic circles. “Antisemitism is indispensable to us,” writes the unknown author in his fictitious role as a Jewish conspirator, “for the management of our lesser brethren,” meaning: to maintain cohesion among the lower classes of Jews.20 In 1942, Martin Heidegger noted that “essential Jewishness” was the “culmination of [the Jew’s] self-destruction in history.”21 Their “calculating reason” had led to a “Judaization of technology,”22 which turned against the Jews in the course of industrialization. The Holocaust thus makes possible a “purification of being,” the Nazis become “instruments of processes justified by fate,”23 as Emmanuel Faye, Sidonie Kellerer, and François Rastier put it in a 2015 article on the occasion of the publication of Martin Heidegger’s “Remarks.”

Today, we see the same reversal of offender and victim roles not only in a flood of TikTok videos in which people with no knowledge of the subject use a pseudoscientific tone to sell the alleged “genocide” of the Palestinians at the hand of the Israelis and the legitimacy of jihad to a young audience; or on platforms like The Grayzone by Max Blumenthal, who blames the Israeli military for most of the victims of the pogroms of October 7 and uses snippets from press articles to engage in manipulation on a massive scale.24 A major TV news channel like CNN equally volunteers as a Hamas propaganda machine, reporting that Israeli forces searching for the remains of the October 7 hostages had “desecrated” at least sixteen cemeteries in Gaza.25

Smooth Transition to Barbarism

In the so-called German “Qualitätsmedien,” on the other hand, the black-clad UdK students and their red hands caused an uproar and were instantly associated with a well-known lynching incident. In October 2000, two Israeli reservists took a wrong turn and ended up in Ramallah, where they were arrested and taken to a police station. Men armed with knives and poles then stormed the place, lynched the two Israelis, tore out their eyes and internal organs, burned one of the corpses, and dragged it through the streets—as an act of revenge for a Palestinian youth who had been killed two days earlier in clashes with Israeli forces. One well-known picture shows one of the young murderers, Aziz Salha, proudly smiling as he presents his blood-soaked hands to the mob.

This overinterpretation of the student action assumed that the UdK students had actually celebrated the pogroms of October 7 with a similar impetus to that of the hate-filled Salha when he committed his crime. But aren’t these clueless youths actually ignoring the Palestinian massacres? And aren’t they, in their delusion, looking at the Palestinians as defenseless victims of Israeli violence? If only we were dealing with a group of radical glorifiers of terrorism, how much easier would it be to make it generally understood that this is not to be tolerated? Instead, we are confronted with the subtle terrorism of the well-meaning, to which journalist Claudius Seidl reacted in an interesting way in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. In his article “Die Politik der Verdammnis” (“The Politics of Damnation”) in the November 23, 2023 edition of the FAZ, the features editor reported about students’ claims that the red-painted hands were to be understood as a metaphor for the blood that is “on the hands of German politicians who support the Israeli war with arms deliveries.” Seidl, however, does not believe the students: “Anyone who has studied Israel’s recent history will interpret the red hands . . . differently.”26 The crux of the matter, however, is not only that very few people actually engage in these studies: the main issue lies above all in the way in which this recent history of Israel is conveyed in schools and in the media today.

One might ask Seidl in return: how does the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung actually report on Israel? In contrast to the Süddeutsche Zeitung, the ZEIT, the Spiegel, the taz, or the Frankfurter Rundschau—not to mention formats such as ZE.TT and FUNK—the FAZ is generally not suspected of having been taken over by young wokesters, and alongside the Neue Züricher Zeitung is still considered a refuge of common sense.

However, in July 2020, Jochen Stahnke claimed in an article in the FAZ entitled “Die Kehrseite des Zionismus” (“The Flip Side of Zionism”)27 that annexing occupied territories in the West Bank would “transform Zionism into a Greater Israel project of continued settler-colonial land grabs” and “undermine the legitimacy of the entire state,”28 thus placing conditions on Israel’s right to exist on the front page of one of Germany’s most widely read newspapers.

In January 2022, Wolfgang Reinhard wrote in an opinion piece entitled “Vergessen, verdrängen oder vergegenwärtigen?” (“Forget, Repress or Remember?”)29 that “along with the duty to remember, it now seems appropriate to recall the right to forget.”30 Mind you, the article is about the Holocaust. In the concluding sentence, the historian quotes the Jewish “political scientist and Germany expert” Alfred Grosser, who wrote in 1970 that “attention to the special status of Judaism must inevitably generate hostility.”31 He calls for moderation: “Too much anti-antisemitism may generate antisemitism.”

In May 2022 already the subheading of Christian Meier’s article “Warum die Lage in Jerusalem gerade sehr angespannt ist” (“Why the Situation in Jerusalem is Very Tense Right Now”),32 published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, featured the popular inversion: “On Sunday, nationalist Jews will hold their annual flag march. Palestinian groups see it as a provocation.”33 The Jew as agent provocateur, needlessly enraging the Palestinians.

A month later, at the height of the antisemitism scandal surrounding documenta fifteen (the 15th edition of the recurring exhibition of contemporary art), the arts editor of the FAZ, Niklas Maak, assured readers that “on the first walk around Documenta, there was absolutely nothing to be seen that would confirm the fears.”34 Instead, Maak reported on an “attack on the exhibition building” in which, fortunately, “nobody was hurt.”35 While there were depictions of Jews as pigs and octopuses throughout the show,36 which must have escaped Maak’s notice, any trace of an attack was missing, other than a few stickers reading “Freedom not Islam,” “Solidarity with Israel,” and “Free Gaza from Hamas”—and a few tags, presumably by teenage hip-hoppers. A scenario of imagined racist acts against Documenta curators and artists was deliberately constructed to distract from the evident antisemitism. The false claim that there had been an attack was never retracted.

Hanno Loewy, director of the Jewish Museum in the Austrian town of Hohenems, is a staunch opponent of the German parliament’s May 2019 resolution against the BDS movement. In December 2020, he put forward a bold thesis in the FAZ, according to which the fight against BDS brings about “a much more effective boycott against Jews . . . than BDS itself could have ever initiated.”37 In terms of an organization, he claims, BDS is as insignificant as “a mouse” and only uses “toothless means . . . to occasionally put pressure on a festival.”38 Either intentionally or, more fatally, out of ignorance, the do-not-buy-from-Jews movement is trivialized to the extreme. Thanks to the resolution, “friends of the AfD” (the right-wing populist political party Alternative für Deutschland) and “‘anti-German’ activists” could now “take particular pleasure in labeling anti-Zionist Jews as antisemites,” Loewy fumes.39 He frames the “fight against BDS [as] a demonstration of power on the side of the state”40 in the style of Viktor Orbán, whom he compares, en passant, to the heavily armed right-wing extremist who tried to break into a synagogue in the East German city of Halle in 2019, ending up killing two passersby.41 Loewy also brings up the apartheid accusation, claiming that “Israel’s definition as a ‘Jewish state’” degrades “its Arab residents, in some cases long-established ones . . . , to second-class citizens.”42

Patrick Bahners, who is responsible for the humanities section at the FAZ, claimed in June 2023 in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung that by condemning BDS as an antisemitic movement, the “boycotters are being accused of hatred of the boycotted,” which causes the “number of antisemites to constantly increase.”43 Under Bahners’s post of his own article on Twitter, one user commented sarcastically: “It’s the fault of the Jews when people have something against them.” In December 2020, Bahners tweeted: “By the way, ‘Israel-related antisemitism’ (supposedly the most common form of antisemitism) was invented to scandalize criticism of Zionism.”44 In September 2021, in response to a tweet by German-Israeli author Ahmad Mansour about the trivialization of Islamism, Bahners wrote that Mansour’s choice of words “assumes without reason that Islamism is per se something bad.”45 We are told that there is good Islamism and bad Islamism.

In January 2023, the FAZ retracted an article about the corrupt Palestinian government, entitled “Doppelstandards für den Frieden” (“Double Standards for Peace”), because it allegedly contained a “considerable number of factual errors.” Instead of correcting the article, only a run-of-the-mill apology with a list of errors was posted online.46 Israeli ambassador Ron Prosor reacted to the retraction with a letter to the editor expressing concern about the recurring, seemingly random public acts of shaming of “editors who write positive things about Israel.”47 Yet even the very blunt letter, which Prosor also posted on his Twitter profile, had no effect. The article was simply made to disappear, as was any reference to its author.

And in December 2023, in a report on a conference about antisemitism organized by the founder and director of the Frankfurt Research Center on Global Islam, Susanne Schröter, Alexander Jürgs commented on the publicist Malca Goldstein-Wolf’s interjection at one of the panel discussions, in which she stated that she felt that Israel was “not really doing much wrong,” concluding: “Anyone who talks like this is not interested in a real debate.” After all, a “yes” to Israel must always imply a “yes but.”48

In recent years, overlaps between “serious” media of all stripes and pseudointellectual antisemitic defamation platforms à la Electronic Intifada have become increasingly frequent. The transition to barbarism is smooth. In view of the extent of institutional capture by the new identitarian left and of the media’s interest in keeping up with an increasingly radicalized pseudo-progressive cultural hegemony that sees Israel as an alien element in the heart of the Global South, this development should not come as a surprise. Whoever lives under the illusion that it is possible to buy a conservative German-language newspaper at the newsstand is part of the problem.

Horror behind the Mask of Humanism

With “The Politics of Damnation,” Claudius Seidl has written an honest article expressing his genuine horror. He is a sensitive observer of the situation, seriously concerned but, like many others, reluctant to descend into the sewers to poke around in the foul water. Out of sheer revulsion, he does not even try to understand what drives the UdK students with their red hands, but merely describes the shock of what seems new to him. He writes that, by comparison, the protest actions of the students of the 1968 generation appear “like philosophical exercises” to him; their arguments “so clever and rational.”49 “Ho-Ho-Ho Chi Minh!”—was that chant clever and rational? Seidl’s observation about differences in protest aesthetics draws a dividing line where there can be none. It was precisely the students of the 1968 generation who avoided the conflict with their family environments contaminated by National Socialism, projecting it onto an allegedly fascist America.50 They are the trailblazers of the anti-Western, pro-Palestinian UdK students who now denounce Israel as a fascist state. However, the students of yesteryear understood the universities and later every other institution as battlegrounds for the fight against the old establishment, only to become the new establishment themselves, while the UdK students are creatures of the establishment, egged on by their professors to protest against Israel and attending courses in which they are taught that “with the appropriate indigenous knowledge, you can hear the trees talking,” as Seidl reports.51 They are, despite all personal responsibility, victims of a takeover that their parents’ and grandparents’ generations have facilitated, willingly or out of indifference. Only a series of traumatic experiences, caused by the same barbarization in which they unwittingly participate, will possibly tear them out of their sectarian existence one day, if at all.

Seidl and all those who, like him, have only dimly grasped the situation must see the UdK students as nothing more than liars, deliberately concealing their true intentions, especially since the image of their raised red hands continues to evoke that of Aziz Salha. But the somber, devout, earnest demeanor of those students hunkered down on the art school floor has nothing in common with the youthful glee of the animalistic slaughterer. The essential question is: why should the students have deceived us all about their intentions, given that their red-hands action, which had been evidently planned in advance, was aimed at conveying a strong and unequivocal message? Seidl writes that “what one sees there” is impossible to grasp and can only make one ashamed.52 But what he has seen, he cannot comprehend and does not want to comprehend. It is the horror that returns behind the mask of humanism, which considers all peoples, cultures, and religions as equal and must therefore seek a rational reason for the massacres in the kibbutzim—a reason it is however unwilling to find in Islam as an ideology of conquest and subjugation. That is when talk arises of a “spiral of violence,” behind which history disappears. Israel’s military superiority, which after thousands of years of persecution finally enables Jews to defend themselves against annihilation, makes them nothing but perpetrators. Somewhere at the beginning of this ahistorical “spiral of violence” stand the strong, who are always necessarily the oppressors.

This secular humanism characterizes the new antisemitism, which cries out “Israel!” in rage and deludes itself into thinking that it is criticizing the Israeli government when it is in fact referring to the Jews. It is the antisemitism with a human face that is systemic in the culture and the media. And since it is systemic, it must be talked down as much as possible, because anyone eager to succeed in these spheres has to accept it in some form or another and therefore has to resist actually comprehending it. That is why even in the most reasonable reactions of the media, despite all the indignation, there is usually a sense of reluctance to understand individual episodes as part of something much larger. Instead we are confronted with occasional isolated outrage and the learned inability to properly interpret intentions, statements, and signals. Only the most obvious manifestations are scandalized and attributed to single actors. The ideology that permeates and drives these actors remains concealed.

The red-handed protest arose within a comfortable bubble, where no one risks getting distracted by historical contexts or reports from the real world. If Israel is an illegitimate “entity,” as it is now called in jargon, then anything that puts the Palestinians in a bad light or even exculpates Israel is illegitimate. But by accusing young ingenuous souls with little or no analytical skills of glorifying terror, as the German press from FAZ to taz has done, the media hands them victimhood as a weapon on a silver platter. Now they can once again grow indignant about all the nastiness showered on peace-loving people who care so much about Palestinian children—and only about those children! This way, those who already think alike discover even more commonalities they share: on the one hand, mainly white middle-class kids, for whom solidarity with the Palestinians seems obligatory according to intersectional logic; and on the other, easily outraged Arab young men and hijab-wearing furies, brandishing ISIS flags, wrapped up in their own victimhood on the streets of Western capitals. Together they will besiege a New York pediatric cancer clinic screaming “shame” because it collaborates with medical facilities in Israel.53

We are witnessing, even if with farcical traits, the coalition of non-integrated minorities and the radical intelligentsia that Herbert Marcuse had envisioned in the 1960s as the new revolutionary subject in the fight against the existing capitalist order.54 This alliance mirrors the historical invention of Palestinian nationalism, which arose from Communist expansionism and Arab resentment over the existence of Israel. The 1968 generation is often credited with having read a lot, and yet despite or perhaps precisely because of that, they fell for the mass murderers Che Guevara, Hồ Chí Minh, and Mao Zedong. Today’s generation does not read at all, and so the unsophisticated project of Islamic autocracy gradually overrides the broken dream of Communism as an old yet new collectivist project—in the form not of mass conversions to Islam but rather of sympathies for jihadist fervor and of a steadily growing animus toward Jewish exceptionalism. But how was such a degree of intellectual impoverishment possible? One can trace aspects of this development by looking at the example of the Berlin art school where the red hands protest took place.

IDF T-shirt and Chanel N°5

When Katharina Sieverding took up her professorship at the UdK in the early 1990s, the reek of nineteenth-century rot must have been smelled from afar. When I joined her class in 2000, she had already turned the place upside down. She had set up photography and computer labs within the old walls of Hardenbergstraße 33, which until then had only witnessed painting technique courses and art history classes that did not venture further than Francis Bacon. And with the theoretical approach of the class, which she had named “Visual Culture Studies” in reference to music journalist and “pop theorist” Diedrich Diederichsen, she managed to bring new people into an institution where little or no theory had been taught before. Unlike her fellow professors with their select circles of students, our class was open to anyone who wanted to drop by, and new students were chosen via democratic vote to join the class, even if some votes counted more than others. It was a reenactment of what Sieverding had experienced as a student of Joseph Beuys at the Düsseldorf Art Academy: a class without size limit, with a teaching practice shaped by the students themselves. And she brought a glamorous touch to the worn-out drabness of the Berlin art school—the ever-flawless fiery red lips, the sunglasses worn even at midnight, the large Chanel N°5 bottle that was occasionally whipped out.

But with the new theoretical positions, with the supposed breath of fresh air, a theoretical vocabulary of the humanities and social sciences that was itself already in an advanced state of decay was transplanted into the students’ minds. What took place was an import from the Anglosphere of those academic disciplines that end in “studies,” which subordinate academic research to ideology in order to concentrate entirely on activism and filling positions with like-minded people. The trendy leftist discourse of the semester was delivered: Italian workerism, Afrofuturism, and the like. All the old stories revisited. The intrinsic focus of the activist disciplines on specific identities, contexts, and “political practices” led to strange alienating effects due to the lack of any prior knowledge. Students read Antonio Negri not only without having absorbed Marx but also without knowledge of the terror of the Red Brigades or of the socioeconomic situation in Italy in the late 1970s, but they were equipped with terms such as “multitude,” which could then be effectively incorporated into long-winded rehashes of Jean-Luc Godard’s essayistic cultural revolution pop film La Chinoise, shot with a mini-DV camcorder and a group of friends in shared flats in Kreuzberg. Although during those innocent first years of the new millennium, young minds were being contaminated by Edward W. Said’s resentment of the West or by Frantz Fanon’s fantasies of decolonial ethnic cleansing55 just as the generation that preceded them had been, before the dawn of the age of social media and within societies that had not yet been reshaped by identity-political conflicts they were only exposed to these ideas in school. Watching Sun Ra’s 1974 Space Is the Place in a seminar back then—a trash epos about a utopian space colony to which only purely black people are admitted—one could only find amusement in it, completely unaware of the fact that two decades later, the anti-white subtexts familiar from blaxploitation films would find their way into political party programs and human resources departments.

I rejected postcolonial theory from the very beginning, before I even understood what it was. I am also convinced to this day that Homi K. Bhabha is impossible to read. I sat there in my IDF T-shirt to annoy the tutor, Katja Diefenbach. She, however, took it with composure. It was the time of post-Marxism: that was not woke yet, and there was still some leeway. Antisemitism was explicitly dealt with in a seminar that I can still recall, but the topic was limited in time and space to the brief period of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s artistic directorship at the Theater am Turm in Frankfurt, and none of the participants apart from me had ever watched a Fassbinder film. For many, it was a state of constant overload. Besides that, the status that the class enjoyed in the Berlin art scene thanks to Katharina Sieverding’s prominence and influence encouraged hubris in some and intimidated others. At some point, Katharina brought to the UdK the former RAF getaway driver Astrid Proll, with whom we were to read Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others in a seminar. Katharina clearly enjoyed the whole thing; for her it was a game. I just thought to myself, isn’t there anything beyond this leftist rubbish? Still, I also had fun because I understood her game. It was an anarchic game with a sense of the absurd, ultimately a bit like Sol LeWitt with his open cubes.

However, the crucial point is that due to her formation steeped in the insouciance of old-left circles, Katharina failed to recognize the arsenal she was playing with; she was unaware that by arbitrarily transforming an entire institution from a snooze club into a neo-leftist indoctrination center, she was helping pave the way for the authoritarians of tomorrow. Most of the students didn’t understand the game anyway; they simply seemed to accept everything uncritically while at the same time looking visibly uncomfortable. I was happy to contribute to this discomfort: I was pretty tough and sometimes mean during the vodka-soaked and smoke-filled group critiques, which sometimes went on late into the night. I simply was not able to stand the embellishment of every artistic product with a politically acceptable veneer. As most of the students puttered about as complete art history virgins, they kept presenting works that at first glance appeared to be completely derivative, but which were ultimately just forgeries without any awareness of the original. And then the same line, over and over again: “My work is about . . . ”

After having skimmed through some photocopied excerpts from Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble and having watched the New York ballroom culture documentary Paris Is Burning, they were now ready to adopt the poses of drag for some photo project—after all they even knew a few gays personally. They felt pressured into interrogating their own identity and did so frantically, problematizing their own origins and persistently filming themselves while inspecting their own physiognomies; they assembled documentaristic collages, in which found objects and random associations of images suddenly appeared to make for some profoundly significant social criticism; they used makeup to paint little feminist statements on art-supplies-store canvases; they came back from vacations with some accidental video footage and tried to retroactively charge it politically by adding some postcolonial window dressing. A student set up a polling station in an artist-run gallery and invited perplexed migrants ineligible to vote to take part in a fictional election. Two others founded the “Transnational Republic,” printed their own currency, and issued mock passports in empty retail spaces. None of this was touched by any anarchistic spirit or playfulness; everything was uptight and self-serious and shrouded in would-be relevance, since it had something to do with queer, something to do with body politics, something to do with migration and open borders.

Compensatory Functionalization

The misery of having to introduce every artwork by compulsively providing a declaration of intent, which is also meant to serve as the work’s raison d’être, had to do with the ever-increasing urge for a compensatory functionalization of art—a kind of art that is ashamed of simply being art. In the climate of the New Left’s cultural hegemony, any ambition to make “political art” can only result in politicized art, art with a purpose other than art. Art that, as Juliane Rebentisch, a professor of philosophy and aesthetics with ties to BDS, put it from a left-wing perspective, is set to become “an instrument of the practical-political realization of utopia”56—in other words, applied art. Art history has lost its object of inquiry and can only offer itself as a quarry of visual strategies because the functionalized art that is being produced on a massive scale today is precisely just an instrument and should therefore actually be historicized as a separate discipline. What remains is the desire to participate in something, no matter what, and the longing for a purpose. Both find their most pathetic expression in the political symbolism of the pro-Palestinian ceremony held by the UdK students. And both are traits of the authoritarian character, which strives toward the totalitarian.

The artist has two choices: the market or the institutions. Some perform well in both at the same time. But the game that used to spark joy has been over for quite a while, at least for those who keep an eye on current affairs. The extinction of the figure of the art collector as an upper-class bourgeois intellectual, which is no longer being produced by society, and the resulting transition from collecting art as an aesthetic obsession in intellectual kinship with artist friends to collecting as capital investment is consistently explained away as a symptom of late capitalism, while it was precisely the left that carried out the destruction that led to this society. The trick of completely ignoring one’s own cultural hegemony and instead blaming every unwelcome development on an undesired economic system must immediately strike anyone as absurd who does not get a kick out of the cocaine of Ceauşescu’s dialectical materialism. The takeover and undermining of institutions and academies were carried out with such ruthlessness that any actual criticism or individual form of expression was bound to suffocate in the resulting vacuum. And contrary to oft-repeated claims, art criticism has not been annihilated by the diktat of the art market, but rather has been turned against itself and wrecked in the service of propaganda. An art market consolidated around a group of industrialized mega-galleries and the institutions gutted by a hostile takeover that has left no one inside still willing to expose themselves—out of passion or intellectual pioneering spirit—to any risks, now represent the only filters, the only selective instances through which only functionalized art is washed to the surface. Just notice the embarrassed looks one receives when simply mentioning the term “quality” in connection with art—it is worth trying out. Quality is a highly subjective standard, but due to the neo-Maoist campaign of annihilation against any form of subjectivity, there seem to be no more criteria for determining it. What is left are the economically connoted category of “value” and the ideologically connoted category of “relevance.”

By eliminating any criterion “based on authority through authorship,”57 that is, on the “principle of Western intellectuals, writers, philosophers, and artists,”58 we fall back into the “culturalism”59 of the collective, which is necessarily hostile to any individual and which carries antisemitism within it.60 In short, this is how art theorist Bazon Brock put it in a brief radio interview for Deutschlandfunk in the summer of 2022, in which he offered by far the most poignant commentary on documenta fifteen. However, when it comes to assessing the root causes, Brock remains very much the Fluxus boomer that he is: “From Erdoğan to Putin to Xi, in all these totalitarian fundamentalist regimes, the front line of culturalism is being strengthened. And in the West, too, the cultures and their main representatives are given the leadership over art.”61 Brock seems to be applying Arendt’s old concept of totalitarianism here, thereby explaining away the entire project of the neo-neo-left, which in its various shades of postcolonialism, intersectionality, critical race theory, and wokeness not only has served as the foundation for this last Documenta but has also been dominant in art at least since Catherine David’s Documenta X in 1997. The decision to go with the curatorial collective Ruangrupa and its brazenly naive, juvenile, folksy antisemitism was, as Brock correctly observes, “really intended as a strategy.”62 But Brock is mistaken in his definition of the motive: “People are fed up with the variety of demands that require historical knowledge, etc. And they reject it, because they don’t know anything. That is why they return to the sheepfold of cultural identities.”63 But no, intellectuality is not rejected due to lack of knowledge: the de-intellectualization is intentional, it is programmatic. This is not a return to identity with a reactionary mindset; it is the elevation of identity to a progressive category.

The students with the red hands, who declare racial-nationalist butchers of Jews as their protégés because they are “people of color,” epitomize a takeover that has been allowed to happen. The 1968 generation, which set the long march in motion, still carried the old world within it, despite its glorification of the revolutionary, but it opened the gates to a generation that has only anecdotal knowledge of that world and is pressing ahead with the degradation and destruction of our present societies with much greater pragmatism. After one or two more generations, the thread will have been severed for good.

Max Horkheimer, who headed the Institute for Social Research from which the Frankfurt School emerged, and who, together with Theodor W. Adorno, wrote the seminal work of Critical Theory Dialectic of Enlightenment, had understood this development. During the Nazi era, “the only hope was the revolution,” but now “the opposite danger exists that this revolution precipitates a new totalitarian, terrorist state.”64 Horkheimer pointed to the conservative character of Critical Theory, which he considered to be in keeping with the times, and to the necessity of preserving the achievements of bourgeois societies: “To be radical today means to be conservative.”65 Israel is, in this sense, a conservative project that could never be made comprehensible to woke students. Conservatism itself as a return to all that seems to have been lost today, in order to create the conditions for its reemergence in a new form appropriate to today’s state of affairs, is the counter-project to the current cultural hegemony.

The pictures from the entrance hall of the UdK are glimpses into a generalized entropy. After the takeover, the hollowed-out institutions always reproduce the same ideology in ever more radical forms and become an inhospitable place for any expression of dissidence. When art itself was still an expression of this dissidence, when it still possessed the autonomy to reject being fully functionalized neither for the market nor for institutionalized forms of political activism, it thrived on the abstraction that makes it art in the first place—the abstraction that the authoritarian character is unable to bear. Every curatorial project that sets out to combine twentieth-century artworks with contemporary art represents, willingly or unwillingly, a testimony of a rupture, and must inevitably result in a discordant ensemble, in which ambiguous, mocking, and venturesome documents of a lost era stand irreconcilably opposed to the safe mock-ups of the applied arts of the new millennium. Lautréamont’s absurdist image of “a chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table”66 has turned from a pleasurable surrealist game to a description of a condition.

Black Dada BLA

At the Mumok in Vienna, I walk through an exhibition by the gay, black American artist Adam Pendleton, who, according to the exhibition text, “has articulated much of his work through the idea of Black Dada, an ever-evolving inquiry into the relationship between Blackness, abstraction, and the avant-garde.”67 What I see is easily sellable medium formats, spray paint on silkscreen, letters that fail to form words. “Anagrammatic,” as Galerie Max Hetzler puts it; “a visual chorus of excited multiplicities,”68 according to Pace Gallery’s website. The sequence of letters “BLA” sticks out on one of the paintings in the exhibition.69

After Pace came under fire in 2020 amid the George Floyd fever for lack of diversity in its staff, a two-person “Culture & Equity” team was put together, and two years later, black activist Kimberly Drew was installed as associate director and curator. On October 9, 2023, Drew shared a series of posts on Instagram70 celebrating the massacre at the Nova music festival in the Negev desert as “the largest ever Palestinian liberation operation in modern history”71 and as an “act of resistance” in the fight “for life, dignity, and freedom.”72 When I confronted Pace with screenshots, I received a carelessly cobbled-together routine email response from the Associate Director of Public Relations: “Pace supports meaningful freedom of speech and respectful differences of thought among its employees.”73 One can guess what kind of conversations actually take place behind closed doors at a gallery founded by Arne Glimcher, who is Jewish, and run by his son Marc Glimcher. But this dash of Blackness secures the gallery’s reputation, and Adam Pendleton, as an artist of the gallery, is likely to contribute significantly to it as well.

The term “Black Dada” is a response to the “Black Lives Matter” slogan; “they are both very clear short statements,” Pendleton says in an interview.74 His painted Black Dada Flag (Black Lives Matter) was flown at the Venice Biennale in 2015 and then in large format on a flagpole on Randall’s Island in 2018 for Frieze Art Fair in New York. Pendleton was prompted to create the work by his participation in a 2013 protest march for Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old unarmed black teenager who was shot and killed by neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman—a Latino—in self-defense. After Zimmerman’s acquittal, the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter spread across social media and a movement of unprecedented anti-white obtrusiveness was born, which never substantiated the criminological aspects behind this violent act.

Since then, references to BLM have repeatedly appeared in Pendleton’s work. In his exhibition Who Is Queen? at the MoMA in New York in 2021, a year after a “Summer of Love” marked by riots, assaults, and murders, the protest aesthetic of BLM was re-evoked for the white cube, with Pendleton integrating audio recordings of a Black Lives Matter demonstration into a sound work.

The multi-million-dollar empire of BLM is essentially built on donations and misinformation about an epidemic of police violence against black people, which is statistically completely refutable. But any attempt at refutation can also be instantly discredited by insinuating racist motives. In 2020, at the height of the BLM hype, an artist friend told me that an acquaintance had contacted him to encourage him to donate to Black Lives Matter. When he hesitated, the evidently fanaticized woman blackmailed him, threatening to defame him as a racist within the scene. Obviously, he transferred the amount, but he also convinced other friends to donate as well, and was even grateful to the woman for opening his eyes to the injustice done to blacks. When I asked him how many unarmed blacks he thought are shot by police in the United States every year, he told me he didn’t know, but that they had to be in the thousands. However, according to statistics, in 2019 there were only 14 (and, for comparison, 25 unarmed whites)75—in a country where blacks make up 13.6% of the U.S. population76 and are responsible for 51.3% of the murders.77 However, since most of these murders are committed by black people against black people, they never receive any identity-political attention, because the sociopolitical reality of “black-on-black crime” contradicts the most basic woke convictions about white violence against innocent people of color. The fact that some BLM activists are in part in cahoots with the fanatically antisemitic Nation of Islam, that they maintain direct ties to Hamas through the front group Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), and that in 2020 they marched through Los Angeles smearing antisemitic and anti-Israel slogans on synagogues, schools, and Jewish memorials, vandalizing Jewish businesses78 and shouting “Death to the Jews”79—all that too has never reached the art world or is dismissed as a right-wing conspiracy theory.

The Art of Allusion

Adam Pendelton glamorizes BLM but never positions himself clearly. Everything remains in limbo between endorsement and pop-cultural citation. Being forty years old, he is part of a generation that seems to be solely concerned with generating a diffuse sense of the political. He is miles away from the critical realism of someone like Santiago Sierra, who is only eighteen years older. Pendelton has mastered the art of allusion, juxtaposing references just like Balenciaga does with neon-colored ball gowns, homeless-inspired layered looks, and XL sneakers on steroids. In Pendleton’s own words, Black Dada is about “problematizing the relationship between conceptual art and civil rights, or between the avant-garde and the history of black people in America.”80 “Formally” it relates “to modernist painting and the monochrome,” but “also sort of messing it up.”81 He throws around references that are never resolved. His 2016 exhibition Becoming Imperceptible at the Contemporary Arts Center in New Orleans included, according to Pendleton, “various historical references, from the Bauhaus to Malcolm X to the Black Panthers to Godard.”82 Sol LeWitt’s open cubes are also quoted at times in his works, and superimposed with characters, or referenced like in the installation Rendered in Black (2007), where thirty glazed ceramic cubes—black, of course—are studiedly arranged in space in random patterns. When Pendleton, however, attempts at spontaneously quoting from LeWitt’s “Sentences on Conceptual Art” during an interview, the result is “Illogical judgments lead to new experiences,”83 a kind of motivational-training version of “Irrational thoughts should be followed absolutely and logically.” At this point at the latest, one cannot but realize that someone here is playing around with material that he does not have a clue about. But, conveniently, there are hardly any authoritative figures left who would care to point this out. And why would they? It is all about success, and Pendleton has a lot of it. That is the measure of all things. Whoever expresses critique today ends up looking like an envious, pretentious loser.

LeWitt himself became Pendleton’s first collector. In 2002, an assistant drew his attention to a painting by the young artist, and he traded it for a work of his own.84 An article in the Observer states: “Hearing of LeWitt’s interest confirmed Mr. Pendleton’s feeling that his own work was conceptual, rather than abstract painting.”85 So the focus here is on the strategy rather than the concept: “I was like, ‘Well naturally he would want this brave piece of conceptual art.’”86 Performative statements such as this are testaments of an arrogance perceived as justified, which is part and parcel of the modern reading of Blackness based on the self-conception that one is technically still entitled to reparations 160 years after the abolition of slavery. Everything about Pendleton is inflated hip-hopish ego, proudly displayed self-interest, and feigned indifference as a statement. Functionalized art at this level, regardless of the extent to which it lends itself to serve as a mouthpiece for ideology or to become a product for the international art market, is unencumbered by self-doubt. Pendelton has masterfully applied the recipe for success of our time: choosing, as a non-white person, a “white-coded” reference like, in this case, the Dadaism movement that originally emerged in Zurich at the time of the First World War, stripping it of any historical depth and specificity, sterilizing it to the point of pictogram-like self-evidence, and imbuing it with identitarian kitsch and book-review intellectualism. Where Dadaism turned against the subservient art scene of its time with sarcasm and parodistic furor, Pendleton appropriates the Dadaist vocabulary as a vehicle for the same old catchphrases, like “Black Liberation” and “Resistance.”87 Where Sol LeWitt’s work was shaped by a cheerful purposelessness that was extraneous to the authoritarian because it did not feel the need to explain anything to anyone, and where Santiago Sierra’s critical realism escaped didacticism by virtue of its physicality, in Pendleton’s work the political has crystallized into ornament.

In the near future, when the artists of the old world will all have disappeared and their work can only be understood as inventory, of which to freely dispose, swindlers like Pendleton will have replaced the masters. And the red-handed students will try to emulate them, because it will be the only craft they will have been able to perfect.

Topics: Israel Initiative • TPPI Translations

Niels Betori Diehl is a conceptual artist, architect, and writer living in Berlin. His collaborative work with artist Barbara K. Prokop runs under the acronym NBDBKP and encompasses exhibition-making, interior design, political theory, and clothing.

1. The Trauma

The key episode in Finn Job’s 2022 novel Hinterher begins at Sophia’s drug-filled birthday party in a run-down apartment in the Berlin district Neukölln. A visiting Swedish woman declares in English that “the great thing about Berlin is that you can be whatever you want.”1 The unnamed first-person narrator and his gay lover, the Israeli Chaim, volunteer to go out to pick up more alcohol for the group. When the two step onto a side street off Sonnenallee, standing in public, the narrator confesses that “I was so happy and lost in myself, yes, I was so stupid that I gave Chaim a quick kiss on the cheek” (war ich so glücklich und selbstvergessen, ja, war ich so dumm, dass ich Chaim einen flüchtigen Kuss auf die Wange gab) (99).

Punishment follows happiness immediately. Young neighborhood men shout homophobic slurs at the couple: “Queers! [Schwuchteln!] Let’s go, they’re homos! . . . Allahu Akbar” (99). A gang starts to run after the couple—hinterher, the title of the novel, means “afterward” or “in pursuit”—but fortunately the two are fast enough to make their way back to the safety of the apartment. However instead of sympathy from their friends, they face condemnation. The same Swedish visitor who had just gushed over Berlin’s openness, where everyone can be whatever one wants, launched the opening salvo, again in English in the original: “Don’t you think it was a little bit insensitive to kiss each other? I mean this is Neukölln—their home. You probably hurt their feelings” (102). That mild scolding escalates quickly until their friends eventually denounce them as “Nazis” (103), “fascists” (18), and racists (147). For the identity-political progressives in Neukölln, Nazis are apparently people who kiss in public.

The scene stages the intersection of themes that define contemporary Germany. First, the denunciations that the couple face upon their return testify to the durability of an automatized anti-fascist discourse. Peter, in whose apartment this scene plays out, is a drug dealer and sports an “antifa” T-shirt, evidence that political affiliation has become a combination of virtue signaling and fashion statement (98). In part this disseminated anti-fascism is an understandable constant in German culture since 1945, but it has become particularly acute in response to the rise of the far-right party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). Of course the inflationary use of the “fascist” epithet is familiar in the United States too: any politician we don’t like must be a “fascist,” regardless of the political contents at stake. Nor is the denunciation restricted to politicians: one can recall Seinfeld’s notorious “Soup Nazi.” In Germany this rhetorical inflation is particularly pronounced, but it became a side-show in the American presidential campaign with the escalation of name-calling.

Second, the political left claims to have a monopoly on anti-fascism, thereby marginalizing conservative or Catholic anti-fascist traditions, pushing aside Stauffenberg (the 1944 assassination attempt), the Scholls (the “White Rose” movement), or Konrad Adenauer (Catholic “anti-Prussian” politician and first chancellor of West Germany), while concealing collaborations between Communists and Nazis, especially during the period of the Hitler–Stalin pact of 1939–1941. Yet that same self-declaredly anti-fascist left has undergone its own transformation, thanks to a de facto alliance with Islamism. As traditional working-class groups either abandoned the left with its programmatic socialism or simply dwindled in numbers due to the global reorganization of labor, left activists and parties have begun to seek support and fish for votes among Muslim immigrants, despite the decidedly non-progressive cultural orientations: patriarchy, homophobia, and antisemitism. Such have been the electoral strategies of Jeremy Corbyn in the UK and Jean-Luc Mélenchon in France. Judith Butler has famously declared Hamas part of the global left that deserves support, meaning that the patriarchy, homophobia, and antisemitism are not dealbreakers, not incompatible with solidarity from contemporary progressives.

Third, identity politics—brilliantly parodied in the novel with the Swedish visitor’s hypocritical “you can be whatever you want to be”—has replaced class consciousness. Programs for social change have given way to identity curation; pronouns are more important than raises. Certainly the postmodern narcissism of “whatever you want to be” might seem to be incompatible with the embrace of Islamism with all its dogmatism: no, you cannot be gay in public in Neukölln, as Job demonstrates with the persecution the couple faces. Yet the inner direction of identity politics (obsession with the self) and the outer direction of the anti-imperialism of the Islamist turn (focus on the exotic other) share a common denominator: they both act as vehicles to avoid collective questions of class, labor, and social conflict.

In the following, I want to reflect on this particular cultural political moment as it is captured in Hinterher with regard to the transformations of anti-fascist discourse and the complexities of identity and integration in multicultural Germany. I begin however with a pulse-taking of the response by the intellectual German public to the challenge of right-wing populism.

2. Critical Theory—from NPD to AfD?

The growing popularity of the AfD has unsettled the German public sphere; it is hardly wrong for Germans to worry about the emergence of illiberal forces, whether on the right or the left. Anxiety about right-wing extremism has become acute against the backdrop of the AfD’s strong performance in the European elections in June 2024 and in the September elections in Brandenburg, Sachsen, and Thüringen. Fear of a resurgent extreme right has been further amplified by electoral outcomes elsewhere in Europe, particularly in France and Italy. It is not at all surprising that the AfD success touches nerves in Germany, in light of the Nazi past as well as the specifically anti-Nazi political traditions from the Federal Republic and the GDR—both anti-fascist, albeit in decidedly different ways.

In this context, it is not surprising to find renewed interest in the Critical Theory tradition of the Frankfurt School, especially the works of Theodor Adorno, whose contemporary influence has arguably surpassed, at least for the moment, the resonance of his primary competitors in the intellectual life of the older Federal Republic, Martin Heidegger and Niklas Luhmann. Adorno remains iconic. His thought integrates heterogeneous strands, including German idealism, especially via Georg Lukács’s neo-Hegelianism, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Weber, and Freud, rounded out by background assumptions borrowed from Marxism. Yet his thought also responded to his own historical context: the collapse of Weimar democracy, the rise and devastation of the Nazi dictatorship, and the aftermath of anti-democratic—or, in his terms, “authoritarian”—tendencies in post-1945 Germany. It is this Adorno—not the Hegelian, not the music critic, not the aesthete, but the critic of right-wing radicalism—who has come to the fore in the context of the AfD’s electoral successes, and this defines Adorno’s contemporary reception.

Adorno delivered the address “Aspects of the New Right-Wing Radicalism” at the University of Vienna at the invitation of the Association of Socialist Students of Austria on April 6, 1967. He spoke freely from notes, and the definitive text of the lecture for a volume of his lectures is based on a tape recording. He may not have edited the transcript itself. That text, with an afterword by Volker Weiss, was first published in a small Suhrkamp volume in 2019. Remarkably this booklet has been repeatedly reissued, and in 2024 it reached its seventh edition: Adorno on right-wing radicalism is a topic in demand, indicative of both Adorno’s continued prominence and the endemic nervousness in the suddenly fragmenting political landscape of contemporary Germany.

My concern here is not the historical formation of Adorno’s thought in the face of the rise of Nazism nor his perception of Nazi Germany from the distance of his exile in California. Nor will I address the adequacy of Adorno’s 1967 characterization of the right-wing extremism of the Federal Republic, including the politics of the NPD (Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands) that emerged in 1964 or the rhetoric of Gerhard Frey’s Nationalzeitung, founded in 1951. All that belongs to an era of Cold War neo-Nazism. Instead my interest is the current revival of Adorno’s account in the context of contemporary developments.

To assume that Adorno’s more than fifty-year-old analysis of the NPD could directly apply to the AfD is obviously implausible, especially given the fact that the AfD stands in no significant organizational or personnel continuity with the NPD. Nonetheless the current dissemination of the Adorno text and its repeated reissuing implies the perception—or misperception—of a continuity on the far right, i.e., the assumption that what the sage said about neo-Nazis in 1967 must apply to right-wing extremism in the 2020s. What then does this surging reception of Adorno’s text on the NPD demonstrate about the contemporary left and its anachronistic understanding of the AfD? And—a separate matter—might Adorno’s text shed some light on the confrontations narrated in Hinterher, i.e., the two confrontations, one with the homophobic lynch mob running after the gay couple, and the other with the anti-fascist peers who denounce the gay couple as “Nazis”? What does it say about contemporary progressive rhetoric if epithets like “Nazi” and “fascist” can be used so expansively?

Adorno begins the 1967 address by taking us back yet another decade into the past by invoking his famous 1959 lecture on coming to terms with the past and its premise that a potential for right-wing extremism is a function of the continuity of social structures: “that the social preconditions for fascism continue to exist,” and these structures include above all “the ongoing predominant concentration tendencies of capital.”2 This immanent law of capitalist development, he argues, implies the prospect of the immiseration or Verelendung of social groups, in particular those who thought of themselves as middle class and who are subjectively hostile to the “transition to socialism” (10–11). Adorno then casts this allegedly threatened middle class as the likely source of support for a renewed fascism.

Thankfully Adorno does not dwell for long on this evidently orthodox Marxist framework that interprets social change in terms of putatively immanent laws of capitalism. Instead he turns to what we today might call discursive or rhetorical features of far-right politics. Yet the fact that he grounds his analysis of extremism in assumptions about the development of capitalism shows how historical or, more harshly, how dated and anachronistic his approach turns out to be, in at least two ways. First, contemporary criticism of the AfD and, in general, left-wing criticisms of right-wing radicalism in the twenty-first century no longer typically operate with this kind of orthodox Marxist paradigm. No one seriously still talks about the concentration tendencies of capitalism as the fundamental explanation of political developments, just as hardly anyone posits the inevitable transition to socialism. Adorno in 1967 was speaking in an intellectual environment in which Soviet-style Marxist analysis still held a plausibility it has long since lost. By contrast, when the AfD today is likened to the Nazis or even equated with them, the supposed similarity is not based on allegations of support from concentrated capital. Instead the connection between the Nazi past and the present is made only on the basis of symbolism or rhetoric, e.g., via AfD politician Björn Höcke’s use of the phrase “Everything for Germany” (“Alles für Deutschland”), which is denounced because it echoes a slogan of the SS. Similarly the editorial choice to preface the Thüringen party program of the AfD with a poem by Franz Langheinrich, an otherwise forgotten writer, is taken to prove the Nazi credentials of the AfD because that same poet turned into an adamant Nazi (even though the poem itself is conventional Naturlyrik without explicit politicization). By that logic, every seminar on Heidegger or any publication of poems by Ezra Pound should be viewed as proving fascist sympathies. These sorts of cultural connections have displaced arguments about monopoly capitalism on which Adorno was fundamentally relying. In general, it is fair to say that what calls itself left today has largely shifted away from arguing in terms of political economy and has moved instead into the field of cultural semiotics. It’s the symbol that counts, not the surplus value. Perhaps that’s all for the good: reciting land acknowledgments is a lot easier than land redistribution.

In addition, Adorno bases his argument on the surely accurate claim that the rise of historical National Socialism depended on support from leading industrialists, representing the “concentrated capital” to which he refers. Whether “heavy industry” in West Germany supported the rise of the NPD in the 1960s is an empirical historical question; I doubt it. It was probably more a matter of a “lunatic fringe” of ewig gestrigen, an explanation that Adorno rightly does invoke. In any case, there is no evidence that support from concentrated capital describes the electoral success of the AfD today. For all the very real challenges that the German economy faces in the context of competition with China and the disruptions of environmentalism (to mention only two points), there is no evidence that the heavy hitters—Volkswagen, Daimler, Siemens, or Allianz—cook the secret sauce behind the AfD’s successes. On the contrary, as in the United States, leading companies lean more toward the model of “woke capitalism,” supporting diversity, immigration, and political correctness, necessary corollaries to their export-oriented business models. Whatever is making the AfD tick, it is probably not the German stock market, nor is it whatever is left of heavy industry, as Germany’s manufacturing base continues to collapse thanks to misguided policies and global pressures: what is “made in China 2025” is not going to be made in Germany.

When Adorno moves beyond the terms of political economy to describe aspects of the right-wing radicalism of 1967, he explores the sphere of culture—effectively justifying the pejorative designation “cultural Marxism,” although not in the way Jordan Peterson may mean it—paying more attention to the formal features of the radical right’s speech and ideology rather than to class conflict. He does mention in passing the perception of economic threat among retail merchants, peasants, and some grape growers, “kleine Winzer in der Pfalz” (15), but the thrust of the argument points elsewhere, away from economy and toward terms consistent with the analysis that he and Max Horkheimer developed in their Dialectic of Enlightenment: mass-cultural manipulation and technique, the triumph of instrumental reason.

For example, Adorno claims that the NPD was able to achieve an “organizational mass appeal” (21), which distinguished it from earlier extremist competitors that could not shed a sectarian image. “In Germany what works . . . has to be strict and centralized”—remember, he is speaking to an Austrian audience with its own attitude toward Germany—“but anything that seems sectarian and appears to lack strong backing is automatically suspect and will lack mass appeal.” What he calls “the German ideology” has no room for loners or Einzelgänger (21). Whether that is a sufficient characterization of “German ideology” can be debated: there is plenty of romantic isolation—think of the images of Caspar David Friedrich—or Waldeseinsamkeit in “German ideology,” not just mass movements. Nonetheless, it is fair to say that this capacity to project organizational superiority, which Adorno attributes to the NPD, is not at all a distinguishing feature of the AfD. Party discipline and effectiveness, which Adorno rightly viewed in the Nazis in the 1930s and 1940s, he claims—dubiously—to rediscover in the 1960s in the NPD. In any case, it is surely not a prominent attribute of the AfD to date. On the contrary, it seems not to be able to take advantage of its own electoral successes, as seen in the confusion in the Thüringen state assembly.

In addition, Adorno attributes to the NPD a capacity to mount successful propaganda campaigns. Indeed he calls propaganda “the center . . . in a certain sense the real issue” (41). Yet it is, for Adorno, a propaganda with little content because, he claims, the ideology is too thin; at stake instead is merely the capacity to reach the masses: “Propaganda is primarily a mass psychology technology” (41). Adorno’s understanding of propaganda in 1967, which appears to build on his experiences in the 1930s and 1940s, does not translate easily into the very different media environment of 2024. He may have already been wrong in his projecting onto the NPD in 1967 the capacity for propagandistic breakthroughs the NSDAP had carried out in the 1930s, its mass public resonance. In any case, it is hard to associate that old-style “mass appeal” with the AfD, despite its electoral results. Its achievements in September probably have less to do with media acumen or its politicians’ rhetorical gifts than with the clumsiness of the governing coalition in Berlin. The AfD, in other words, is not an Adornian culture-industry problem, as little as it is a result of capital concentration. Indeed one can argue that the electoral outcome was much more a matter of what the center parties lost than what the extremist parties gained.

Adorno’s NPD analysis however does carry over convincingly into the current moment in two ways. One point that indisputably defines the contemporary mentalities is the sense of imminent catastrophes and “fantasies of the end of the world” (20). There have been plenty: predictions, from the left as much as from the right, of ecological disasters, never-ending pandemics, or prospects of war. Here Adorno is indeed a useful guide to aspects of contemporary radicalism. Job’s novel also ends with a sense of imminent catastrophe. We are all waiting for Armageddon tomorrow.

The second point where the older analysis retains actuality involves the centrality of antisemitism, but now displaced into the toxic alliance of immigrant Islamism and the anti-Zionist left. Islam, Islamism, and immigration make up one enormous topic, especially in Europe; so is the relationship of the left and Zionism, and both of these topics are too extensive to address here in necessary detail. More importantly, however, these two fields intersect in Germany, whose national history has mandated that the security of Israel belongs to its “reason of state,” as per Chancellor Angela Merkel, the same chancellor inescapably associated with the large-scale migration that amplified integration challenges, expanded parallel societies like Neukölln, and led to radical calls for establishing a caliphate in Germany. Under the pressure of these two competing conditions, something is shifting in German self-understanding, as public antisemitism reemerges.

Can the Federal Republic continue credibly to engage in Vergangenheitsbewältigung, addressing the legacy of the Nazi past and the Shoah, without scrutinizing the ideological baggage of immigrants from countries marked by high levels of antisemitism? Can Germany remain an open society with privacy protections but still engage in surveillance of Islamist organizations or end the wave of random knife attacks with Islamist motivations? Can it, as Deniz Yücel has challenged on X, respond to the Islamist attack in Solingen 2024 (an Islamist knife attack) without forgetting the far-right attack in Solingen in 1993 (an arson attack on a home for refugees)?3 And, for the topic foregrounded in Hinterher, we need to ask how the German left is rebalancing its self-declared anti-Nazism, its always at best only half-hearted opposition to antisemitism, with its eagerness to embrace Islamism, despite—as already discussed—the indisputably reactionary contents: patriarchy and homophobia, as well as antisemitism.

For nearly a decade, at least since 2015, a restructuring of the German public discussion has been underway, and all the more so after the September elections and, in their wake, the repeated invocation of a caesura, a break, a recalibration of the social contract. To be sure, the problem is not uniquely German, given the difficult post-election process in France. “If Chancellor Scholz were President Macron, he would call for new elections,” wrote Ulf Poschadt in Die Welt after the elections in Thuringia and Saxony and the defeats of the parties that make up the Berlin coalition, but new elections would likely only make evident the collapse of the SPD across the country.4 Indeed the outcome of new German elections could be worse than in France: where Macron has had to face down the challenge from Mélenchon’s far left, Scholz might end up with a victorious AfD far beyond the states in the German East.5

Germany faces a challenging constellation: a growing new right, a post-left trying to combine identity politics with post-colonialism, and a large immigrant population, and within it the Islamist minority. Against this fragmented background, competing solutions have emerged. The Israeli Arab German Ahmad Mansour argues tirelessly for integration strategies, social work to bring immigrant youth into a Germany of liberal values. In contrast, the German-Jewish author Max Czollek proposes “disintegration,” a call for German Jews to give up on the mendacity of the “memory theater” of reconciliation, although in the face of growing antisemitism, even a hollow memory theater could seem attractive and surely better than a caliphate. And not to be forgotten: the proposal by Chancellor Scholz to pursue deportation “in a grand style,” an aspiration that is hard to differentiate from the vision, imputed to the right, of “remigration,” mass repatriations. Traditional progressive positions are vanishing—such as Adorno’s capitalism criticism—while right-wing positions move to the center and ventriloquize the left. Whatever challenge the AfD’s electoral success may represent, more to the point may be the AfD-ization of the rest of the political spectrum, whether it be the chancellor’s enthusiasm (and after the recent Solingen knife attack, not only the chancellor’s) for deportations or the epigonic left’s internalization of Islamist cultural values. The commentator Sascha Lobo writes in Der Spiegel, “How do you get a German leftist to find right-wing slogans okay? Just translate them into Arabic.”6

And that brings us to Neukölln and the writing on the wall.

3. Antifa and Islamism

Neukölln is the space where the post-left subculture meets immigration from Muslim-majority countries. It is also the geographical setting of the fictional trauma in Hinterher. Some evidence of Neukölln writing may help illustrate the cultural and political tensions that are at stake—as evidenced by a small set of graffiti from the summer of 2024. These texts obviously postdate the writing of Hinterher, which appeared in 2022, but they are nonetheless indicative of some persistent cultural tendencies. The intratextual references in the graffiti demonstrate that they are recent and postdate the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack, another kind of caesura, particularly in its reverberations in Germany. They are all from a side street of Sonnenallee, which is where the novel places the consequential kiss. I assume two different authors, one native German, the other immigrant (perhaps Yemenite), but one person may have spray-painted them all.

The first example protests the Israeli campaign in Gaza, but it insinuates a connection between Germany (for which “Berlin” obviously stands) and the war. My concern here is not an evaluation of German–Israeli bilateral relations, where the question of “German reason of state” would be posed, but rather the nature of the threat articulated in the graffiti, phrased as an elliptical conditional, an “if-then” phrase: if Gaza burns, i.e., if it is attacked, we will burn Berlin. An underlying if implausible assumption in the statement might be that the German government has the capacity to restrain the Israeli government. What is of interest in our context, however, is the apodictic prioritization of Gaza over Berlin, i.e., foreign policy over domestic policy, or, more polemically, the slogan’s privileging of anti-imperialism over social change. The slogan is not “If our rents rise, we will burn Berlin” or “If wages decline, we will burn Berlin.” To be sure, such programmatic slogans might be found elsewhere, but they are not evident here inside this text. This is consistent with the familiar pattern of a reified anti-imperialism that infinitely defers discussions of repressive social conditions, that the Syrian philosopher Sadik al-Azm long ago argued with regard to the Arab nationalism of 1967 and Edward Said’s Orientalism.7 The anti-imperialist “struggle” takes precedence over all other issues, such as gender equality or traditional working-class movements’ concerns with employment conditions. So the identity-political left rallies for Gaza while German manufacturing jobs are being cut.

The second example shows a neighboring inscription, presumably from a different author (different color, different language). From the top right: “Gaza above the world” (غزة فوق العالم), which is effectively an Arabic repetition of the formulation from the German national anthem: instead of Deutschland über alles, we have a version of Gaza über alles. Indeed the phrasing is barely distinguishable from Höcke’s version discussed above, but now we have Alles für Gaza, everything for Gaza. Whatever the intertextual genealogy, the assertion is clearly a statement of absolute commitment to a national cause that is substantially congruent with German national discourse (the anthem) or far-right phrasing (Höcke). However, as Lobo put it, the maximalization of national obligation is now translated into Arabic and therefore appealing to the anti-imperialist left. Beneath this assertion of unqualified allegiance, the author writes, “Long live the resistance” (تحيا المقاومة), a reference to the Iranian terminology of an axis of resistance that includes the Islamic Republic itself and its various proxy forces across the Middle East and evidently in Neukölln as well.

To the left, on the roll-down shade, the same author has written “God is great” (الله اكب—the widely used phrase “Allahu akbar”). At times it might have the colloquial standing of “Thank God” in everyday English, or it can be used as a statement of exuberance, such as when shouted to celebrate a goal in a soccer match. The phrase does however have a primary core religious meaning that ought not to be overlooked, particularly in light of the third example:

This nearby inscription might be by the same author—the same color, similar letter formations, but here the religious register is undeniable: “Yemen, Allah, for the sake of Ali send help” (اليمن الله يا علي مدد). The Yemen reference and the invocation of Ali suggest a Yemenite author, perhaps Houthi identified. The second part of the inscription, the phrase “ya Ali Madad,” derives from legends around the Battle of Uhud of 625 AD, when the Muslim forces, led by Muhammad, fought the heathens of the Qurayshi tribe, and Ali, Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law, arrived to provide support. The phrase is common among Shia and Ismaili Muslims. There are theological complexities associated with the phrase, especially regarding the mortality of Ali, but for our purposes it is useful as evidence of the religious content in the protest against the Gaza War. The goal of Hamas is not secular national self-determination or even national liberation, but rather a version of Islamic or Islamist expansionism.

4. Toward the Repressive Left: What Hinterher Shows Us in Three Points

As noted, for Lobo the left internalizes right-wing positions (authoritarian and repressive) if they are translated “into Arabic.” What that means is surely not just a linguistic question but rather the consequences of the anti-imperialist post-left subordinating itself to Islamist positions, the movement from “be whatever you want to be” to denunciations of a loving kiss as fascist. Instead of free love, Sharia law. The identity-political left is “okay” with reactionary contents if they come via Islamist migrants. Examining this process closer is the real topic of Hinterher, to which we now turn, considering three points: What subjectivity is susceptible to this transformation? What is the face of repression? And is there an emancipatory alternative?

Subjectivity: While Adorno’s analysis of right-wing radicalism from the 1960s has only limited value today, the aesthetic-theoretical side of his legacy recommends our asking about the standpoint of the narrator. Who is telling the story? Hinterher opens with the first-person narrator quitting his job in a Berlin nightclub with “the frenetic hammering, the chemical haze of the half-naked bodies, and the green flickering light, the ecstasy in the empty faces” (9). The atmosphere elicits a feeling of hatred as he leaves his job for the last time. Although he feels no relief, at least he is able to repress the general sense of catastrophe, “for a moment repressing the threat hanging over everything.” At that moment his counterpart Francesco greets him: “I just saw you at the bar, Boy, but you really looked stressed out, really fucked up. Like it was better not to talk to you.” The direct address is the foundational interpellation of the narrator; Francesco, with his own beautifully Italianate name (we later learn both his parents are German, so this name choice is an indication of pretentiousness), dubs the narrator “Boy,” an infantilizing designation that sticks with him throughout the narrative. He has no other name, except for when Sophie calls him “fascist.” Francesco recruits Boy, now unemployed, to join him on a trip to Normandy, a journey that forms the frame for this road novel. Along the way Boy recalls, in nonlinear fashion, the trauma of the assault in Neukölln, just as he recollects the pieces of his past love affair with Chaim.

The joint trip is not a matter of equals. Francesco, who has the money, is in charge; Boy is his dependent and inferior. The duo therefore enact a master-servant relationship, which explains the name “Boy,” a term painfully borrowed from the language of imperialism, hierarchy, and servitude. Boy is the subaltern speaking, who begins with admiration for the master, only later to discover his fatal flaw. Early on Boy explains his appreciation of Francesco: “It was his distance to himself, to the role that he played, such an open approach to his role, the bold but, for his counterpart, clearly arranged view of himself that made him so bearable for me” (39–40). It is this dialectical complexity of character that Boy admires in Francesco, an ironic distance and playfulness about his own identity that preserves a multidimensionality, and which Boy goes on to describe as a rare and endangered capacity. “And this was especially an ability that was dying out everywhere, whose witnesses themselves were dying out, because we had to be one with ourselves and also had to avoid those who reminded us that perhaps we weren’t.” With that phrasing, Job has his narrator provide a programmatic attack on the obligatory one-dimensionality of identity politics that suppresses internal difference and rejects anything that elicits divergent thoughts. Hinterher is offering here more than character analysis, only of relevance inside the plot, but rather also a social theory of fascism with broader significance, even today: “It is dangerous to maintain contact with people like Francesco, too high a risk—yesterday in Germany and tomorrow in the whole world [gestern schon in Deutschland und heute in der ganzen Welt].” The unmistakable reference here is to a Nazi marching song with the refrain “Wir werden weiter marschieren / Wenn alles in Scherben fällt, / Denn heute da hört uns Deutschland / Und morgen die ganze Welt.”8 For Boy, then, Francesco represents a sort of emancipated individuality, an individuality capable of irony and playfulness, features that however are receding before the spread of an alternative, a degraded personality type, flat, unreflected, without differentiation. There are echoes here of Adorno’s account of the authoritarian personality and Marcuse’s “one-dimensional man,” and behind them the prospect of Nietzsche’s “last man.”

But the master-slave dialectic classically entails the instability of hierarchy and an ultimate inversion. In a final confrontation, Boy rebels against Francesco and denounces him as a “Richkid” (179) and “Junkie” (180). In a novel that has been full of drugs from the outset, Francesco has to have Sophia—Boy’s adversary, the one who accuses him of being a fascist—bring him cocaine from Berlin to Normandy. Confronted by Boy, he breaks down and confesses: “I need the cocaine, god. I need the fucking cocaine. I’m her coke whore!” and then later, “Fuck, I’m her shitty coke whore” (180). The master ends up as the slave, destabilizing the previous hierarchy, but Boy never really escapes his endemic weakness.

As a novel of substance abuse and degradation, Hinterher can be compared with works by Bret Easton Ellis and William S. Burroughs, and with regard to politics and drugs in Germany, to Bernward Vesper’s The Trip or Ernst Jünger’s Approaches. In Hinterher, however, there is no romanticization of narcotic effects. The novel describes a society engaged in self-destructive behavior through the consumption of massive amounts of cocaine, ketamine, GBL, or LSD as forms of escapism from a hated existence. Behind the surface-level political rhetoric of fascism and anti-fascism there is a deeper nihilism, where the superficial politics lose most of their importance. On this point, Adorno was right: “Whoever has no prospects and does not pursue social change . . . wants to escape his situation through collapse, but not just the collapse of his own group but, if possible, the collapse of everything” (20). Or as another graffiti artist in Neukölln put it succinctly: “pure hate.”

Repression: Hinterher is a road trip novel about Boy and Francesco’s sometimes surreal adventure from Neukölln to Normandy, where, in a subplot, they house with Gédéon, the eccentric heir to a decaying villa, while Francesco works on an art installation in a church. So it is also a Künstlerroman, or at least a novel about art. At the same time, it is foremost a novel of recollection—references abound to Proust and Remembrance of Things Past. Yet the content of that recollection is the trauma of the events on the Sonnenallee and in Peter’s apartment, the inversion of the moment of innocent happiness into persecution.

The traumatic memory emerges fragmentarily in several discrete passages during the journey, but the core narration of the event is placed nearly exactly midway through the novel. Two significant steps preface it. Gédéon has just engaged Francesco and Boy in construction work, demolishing a wall, and this architectural breakthrough effectively announces the breakthrough of memory. In addition, immediately preceding the narration of the trauma, Boy has an elaborate dream: Kurfürstendamm, Frank Sinatra soundtrack, and the gourmet section of the famous KDW department store, where he opens a door to a hidden room and “Sophia sits at one of the tables with al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. They giggle and whisper with each other. . . . Sometimes the mufti pinches Sophia’s cheek, and then she has to laugh and shake her indefinable hair” (96). Sophia: she is Boy’s former friend, with whom he moved from Westphalia to Berlin, perhaps a former lover who however now participates sadistically in the denunciation of him as a fascist. Al-Husseini was a historical leader of Palestinian nationalism during the thirties and forties who collaborated with the Nazis, given their shared antisemitism, and who spent the war years broadcasting propaganda to the Arab world from a station in Zeesen near Berlin. The representation of Sophia and al-Husseini together stages the uncomfortable alliance of the left with Islamism.9

For German critics of Israel, al-Husseini is a particular irritation because he is proof of the proximity of anti-Zionism to the Third Reich. This provocation is exactly part of the truth content, Adorno’s Wahrheitsgehalt, of Hinterher, exposing the slide of the post-left (Sophia) toward a legacy, the Nazi past, that it knows it ought to denounce, but to which it is drawn. At stake ultimately is a values ambiguity inherent in the traditional left and right distinction.

That dream of a fraternization of the post-left and reactionary Islamism, Sophia and al-Husseini, is subsequently made real in the treatment of Chaim. Arriving at Peter’s apartment wearing a kippah, he encounters abuse both on the street and inside the apartment: “He went to the apartment twice more and walked through Neukölln wearing a kippah. He was only beaten up once because the second time he already had his Taser—but twice he was able to hear from Peter that he shouldn’t be surprised, why did he have to provoke. . . . Yes, Sophia wouldn't be entirely wrong, basically he’s a racist” (147). The narrator can only affirm Chaim’s decision to leave: “Chaim was right to go back to Tel Aviv. In his place, I would have gone too” (147). What Hinterher records then is the erosion of the possibility of Jewish life in Germany, not, or not only, because of imported antisemitism but because of the lack of solidarity precisely in the community that understands itself as progressive. The Swedish visitor was wrong: Chaim’s trajectory shows that you cannot be whatever you want to be in Berlin.

Boy however is fundamentally different. He displays an ingrained resistance to repression. It was he after all who planted the kiss on Chaim’s cheek without thinking, which is consistent with what we know about his oppositional personality: his flight from the provinces to Berlin and his quitting his hated job at the outset of the narrative. In contrast to Sophia, who thrives in the politically correct atmosphere of the university, Boy—despite his intellectuality and bookishness—abandons his academic studies precisely because of the reigning orthodoxies. “Where she cried out for more censorship, I was bothered by the existing speech bans, and where she said we had to be considerate—considerate of God knows who—I thought we were just starting to criticize” (47–48). Answering Francesco’s query as to why he dropped out, he replies, “There is a climate of fear in the universities,” and an extended criticism of contemporary literary theories leads him to the provocation, “If necessary, everything can be buried in gender theory, even unpopular thoughts. All these hidden Heidegger-Nazis, these wretched— . . . . What should I do with these idiots, who do not try to hide their inabilities and present it all as progressive sensitivity?” (48).

Boy rejects structures of repression—in Sonnenallee, in Peter’s apartment, and at the university. Because of this resistance, Sophia declares him a fascist, and she intends to enforce her verdict with violence: “Back then, earlier, Sophia used to sleep a lot with antifa toughs from Thuringia” (27), and she still has one of these brutes hanging around to carry out her political sadism. So when this “Thuringian colossus” (31) asks, “OK, so where is this Nazi now,” Boy knows that he has to flee. Francesco takes him to France.

Liberation: Hinterher traces a road trip, but not simply from Germany to France. Rather, we move from the specific oppressiveness of Neukölln, where you in fact cannot be whatever you want to be, to Normandy—so not just to anywhere in France, but precisely to that region in France still associated with the liberation of le débarquement. Arriving in Caen, Boy notes: “[E]verywhere American flags were flying, and that alone made the city beautiful. The D-Day festivities had been over for a while—were these flags up all year long? Evidently people were more thankful here” (150). By invoking the Normandy landing, the text points to a real anti-fascism, in contrast to the threat of the Thuringian colossus or the gangs in the streets of Neukölln, or for that matter the cosplaying anti-fascists on campuses. No wonder then that Boy and Chaim, on a previous trip, had visited the grave of Klaus Mann, not in Normandy but nonetheless in France, in the south. The invocation of Klaus Mann, son of Thomas Mann, pulls together the various strands of the novel: he was gay, anti-fascist, the émigré who went into exile in the United States but who returned with the American occupation troops. Mann was also a notorious drug user, which further connects to the themes of Hinterher. (The visit to Klaus Mann’s grave in Hinterher echoes the visit to his father’s grave in Christian Kracht’s 1995 Faserland.)

The entwinement of France and liberation even reappears in the religious experience in the Cathedral of Amiens. “I was shaking and kneeled. Shaking I held on to the arm rest. . . . It seemed like my body was commanding that I pray. And I would have dearly liked to have been able to” (54). After an interlude he reports, “Not until I reached a side chapel and saw the flags of the Allies was I able to smile” (55). The Amiens visit here, specifically in the Sacred Heart Chapel with its display of Allied flags, deserves a comparison with the visit to the Marian shrine at Rocamadour in Michel Houellebecq’s Soumission (2015), a novel that has so many other points of contact with this one. Yet the idealization of France in Hinterher eventually wanes in the shadow of the memory of the 2016 Islamist attack in Nice on the Promenade des Anglais, which took 86 lives on Bastille Day, just two days after Boy and Chaim had visited there. The French utopia is shattered.

The title of Job’s novel names retrospectivity and subsequentiality. It points to a formal literary hinterher of recollection, evidenced in the novel’s Proustian ambience, recalling the past love with Chaim. But there is also the aftermath to the trauma in the Sonnenallee, as well as the hinterher to the Shoah that engages the narrator independently of his connection to Chaim. And there is our own hinterher of reception: we are reading this 2022 novel in the aftermath of October 7, 2023, after the calls for a caliphate in the streets of Germany, after the Solingen murders, and after the September 2024 elections. Perhaps most vividly there is the hinterher of pursuit and persecution, when the homophobic mob was running after the couple, a hunt filled with frenzy and bloodlust, in German, Hetzjagd. Job’s novel describes a condition—social, political, perhaps existential—of persecution, as an objective potential in the not-only German present.

Topics: Israel Initiative

Russell A. Berman is the Walter A. Haas Professor in the Humanities at Stanford and Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, where he co-directs the Working Group on Islamism and the International Order. He previously served as Senior Advisor on the Policy Planning Staff of the United States Department of State and as a Commissioner on the Commission on Unalienable Rights. He is currently a member of the National Humanities Council. He is the Editor Emeritus of Telos and President of the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute.

When we analyze the politics of other countries, we have a natural tendency to copy and paste the political map of our own nation and place it onto a different one. Sometimes this is actually helpful. Growing up in the UK, I found that understanding the Conservative Party and the Labour Party as roughly analogous to the Republicans and the Democrats, respectively, was a useful shortcut for coming to grips with American politics.

But not all countries’ political maps can be so straightforwardly aligned. For one thing, party names can cause confusion. In Australia—which closely follows the British political model, with two main parties—there is the left/center-left Labor Party. But Australia’s center-right party, its conservative party, is called “the Liberal Party.” A tricky one for Americans in particular, where “liberal” has been synonymous with the center-left ever since FDR redefined the term to include not just negative rights such as the freedom of speech and of religion, but also freedom from want and fear.

When it comes in particular to Israel, the country I have called home for the past seventeen years, this kind of copying and pasting is a fool’s errand. For one thing, voters in Israel do not choose between two parties, as in the United States, or between three or four, as in the UK. An Israeli voter walks into the voting booth on election day and is confronted with perhaps twenty or thirty options—little slips of paper with different letters, each representing a different party (there’s no electronic voting in Israel). Many parties do not get anywhere near the 3.75 percent of the vote required to be represented in the 120-seat Knesset. Today’s Knesset, elected in November 2022, contains twelve parties: six are from the governing coalition (though, to confuse things further, three of them ran effectively as one party in the election), while six sit in the official opposition.

And that’s another reason why the copying and pasting doesn’t work. Israeli governments are always coalitions. No single party has ever received close to the 61 Knesset seats required to attain a majority by itself. Although today’s government under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is sometimes referred to as “far-right,” the novelty is actually that it is only “right.” Almost every other supposedly “right-wing” Israeli government, including all of Netanyahu’s previous coalitions, has contained parties from the center or the left, which often supplied highly influential ministers, such as Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni from the centrist Kadima or Defense Minister Ehud Barak from the Labor Party.

But there is another, deeper reason why it is more of a hindrance than a help to attempt to understand Israeli politics by thinking about “left” and “right” in the American or European sense of those words. In the Israeli context, these terms came to mean something quite different than their use elsewhere.

At the conclusion of Israel’s War of Independence in 1949, its Arab citizens, though afforded most of the same rights as their Jewish counterparts, had their freedom restricted. Their villages were placed under military administration, with a curfew enforced every night. This discriminatory measure was imposed by the left-wing government of Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion and vehemently opposed by the main opposition party, the right-wing Herut, led by Menachem Begin.

This sounds counterintuitive, but it makes sense in the context of the political constellation of Israel’s early decades. The left, led by Ben-Gurion and his successors Levi Eshkol and Golda Meir, was socialist. The right, led by Begin, was liberal—in the classical, not contemporary American, sense of the word. The socialist left believed in a strong state with powers sometimes bordering on the authoritarian; the liberal right believed that the government was subservient to the civil rights of every individual. “In the beginning, God created the individual,” quipped Ze’ev Jabotinsky, Begin’s mentor and the intellectual father of what became the Israeli right.

After Begin finally won an election in 1977 and removed much of the central planning and other trappings of a socialist state, “left” and “right” in Israel began to mean something else entirely. The Labor Party broadly accepted the new economic dispensation that Begin ushered in. Perhaps uniquely among developed democracies, James Carville’s maxim “It’s the economy, stupid” was almost irrelevant for Israeli elections at this time. The new Israeli divide, as the 1980s progressed, centered on the future of the territories conquered by Israel in the Six-Day War of 1967: as the left became increasingly disillusioned with the status quo of military occupation, the right was determined, for either ideological or security-minded reasons, to hold onto the West Bank and Gaza.

The election of a Labor-led coalition under Yitzhak Rabin in 1992 was the first out-and-out Labor victory since the party was ousted by Begin’s Likud fifteen years earlier. The Oslo Accords, signed between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization—until then, a proscribed terrorist organization under Israeli law—promised peace. Its failure to deliver culminated in the collapse of last-ditch attempts to resolve the conflict at the end of the year 2000, just as fading hopes that the Oslo process could be rescued were about to be incinerated in the inferno of the so-called “Second Intifada”—actually a four-year war by Palestinian terrorists, waged largely by suicide bombers against civilians.

This was the one-two knockout punch for the Israeli left: Yasser Arafat’s rejection of a peace proposal that would have created a Palestinian state in Gaza and ninety-five percent of the West Bank, followed by the ex-guerilla fighter’s return to mass-casualty terror. The left had won support based on a pledge of “security through peace.” Instead, the reliance on Arafat as a peace partner led to the worst security crisis for Israeli citizens in the country’s history, with buses, cafés, and nightclubs being blown up in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv on a weekly basis. Ehud Barak, the Labor prime minister who had attempted to sign an end-of-conflict agreement with the Palestinian leader, returned from Camp David declaring famously, in Hebrew, “ein partner”—there is no partner. The optimism of Oslo was replaced with a grim consensus that united the vindicated peace-skeptics with mugged-by-reality peaceniks: peace with the Palestinians was not possible for a generation or two. And the left crumbled. Barak lost his bid for re-election in 2001, and there has not been another prime minister from the Labor Party to this day.

So has the right been dominant ever since? Not quite. Centrist parties, two in particular, have offered competition to the Likud; and perhaps more significantly, the left-right fault line relating to territory, peace, and a Palestinian state has ceased to be an electoral issue for the past fifteen years. Its electoral centrality was replaced first by socioeconomic issues, and then by a debate around good governance and alleged corruption following criminal charges brought against Prime Minister Netanyahu.

Since then, centrist parties have been a notable feature of the Israeli political landscape. Most have lasted no more than one Knesset term before dissolving. The two exceptions both emerged in the last twenty years. The first, Kadima, positioned itself between Likud and Labor, and it explicitly focused on the Israeli-Palestinian issue. In the wake of the disengagement from Gaza in 2005, with a majority of his Likud party opposed to this radical departure from its traditional territorially maximalist policy, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon needed an alternative vehicle with which to run in the coming elections—and to further his agenda of continued unilateral withdrawal from territory claimed by the Palestinians. He brought with him to Kadima not only fellow Likudniks but also several senior figures from the Labor Party, including the veteran former prime minister, Shimon Peres.

Sharon’s ostensibly timely innovation was created as a single-issue party. He had determined that the left’s analysis of the need to separate from the Palestinians and end Israel’s rule over them was correct, but so too was the right’s distrust of the Palestinian leadership. The solution was therefore for Israel to decide on its own what its borders should be and to withdraw to those lines, evacuating settlements that would no longer be in Israeli-controlled territory. This was, as it transpired, a solution that foundered on the rocks of reality. The Likud returned to power within three years, proven right in their assessment that the vacuum left by Israeli withdrawal would be filled not by Jeffersonian democrats but by Islamist terrorists. 2006 saw Israel attacked by Hamas and Hezbollah, from two areas, Gaza and South Lebanon, respectively, that the IDF had vacated.

Kadima had hoped to triangulate between the traditional Labor and Likud positions. Yet after some initial success, winning twenty-nine and twenty-eight seats in its first two elections, it had collapsed to just two seats by election number three. Today it exists only as a historic footnote: the first party from outside the Labor/Likud duopoly to lead a government.

The second centrist party of note to come along was quite different and reflected the move away from the Palestinian question as the central political fault line. Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid (“There is a future”) entered the Knesset in 2012, and it remains a force in Israeli politics, currently leading the official opposition in the Knesset. Lapid was briefly prime minister, as part of an unusually diverse coalition that governed from June 2021 until December 2022.

Yesh Atid explicitly defines itself as a centrist party, with “centrism” as a distinct sensibility, or, in Lapid’s words, “a movement.” Not a point roughly equidistant between left and right, but “the unequivocal decision of my companions and I to refuse to concede ground to the complexity of our Jewish and democratic state and of our national and liberal identity” (italics mine). His centrism is not only not leftism; he is quite deliberately invoking the ideology of what became the Israeli right: the “liberal nationalism” of Jabotinsky and Begin. Though sounding like a contradiction in terms to modern ears, it can also be rendered more palatably as liberal patriotism: as solidarity—embracing the history, customs, and culture that unite a nation—mutually reinforced by liberal values and institutions guaranteeing individual rights and the rule of law.

In framing his party’s centrism this way, Lapid not only defines his agenda but also hints at the change I identified earlier. Because the best way to understand the political divide in Israel today is not as left vs. right but rather as liberal nationalism vs. conservative nationalism, or National Conservatism. Or as a split between those who wish to preserve the founding Zionist idea of a liberal democratic Jewish nation-state and those who believe that liberalism has taken the country too far away from both Judaism and a more uncompromising brand of Jewish nationalism.

For this second group, a “Jewish and democratic state” is ideally one in which democracy is expressed purely in the system of electing the government; it has no claim on the values of the state or society. Those values are drawn from Jewish religion and tradition, and they should not be diluted by secular liberalism. This formulation has been behind what amounts to a stealth revolution on the Israeli right over the past decade; a push for change led by Yariv Levin, an unassuming Likud Knesset member and minister, whose agenda was initially blocked by Benjamin Netanyahu.

In 2018, however, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister threw his support behind the most illiberal version of the proposed Nation-State Law, a new quasi-constitutional Basic Law. The drafters of this law pitched it as the preamble to a future Israeli constitution, with an opening declarative statement defining “what the state of Israel is,” to supersede Israel’s Declaration of Independence. And while that 1948 founding document promises to “ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; [and] guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture,” the Nation-State Law (full name: “Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People”) pointedly changes Arabic from an official language to one merely granted special status, and omits any mention of “equality” or “democracy” alongside its multiple emphases on the state’s Jewish character. Levin, the principal ideologue behind this legislation, boasted afterward of his achievement in resisting pressure from other legislators to include the word “equality” in the final draft.

Those of us paying attention noticed this quiet drive on the right getting louder. Netanyahu, who learned liberal nationalism from his father, a one-time aide to Jabotinsky, had reassured the judiciary that “every time something arrives on my desk that threatens the independence of Israeli courts, I will block it.” But as the corruption charges against him became indictments, and then scheduled court hearings, he allowed the Likud to be hijacked by Levin and the post-liberals. Upon winning Israel’s most recent election, in December 2022, he formed a coalition with parties explicitly opposed to the classical, liberal-national definition of the Zionist project. He appointed Levin as justice minister, empowered at last to take a sledgehammer to judicial independence, and proposed a series of “reforms” designed to remove any real checks and balances on the power of the government (in American parlance, the executive branch).

These reforms were frustrated, so far at least, by a mass uprising of ordinary Israelis. The government and its supporters insisted on referring to these protestors as “leftists,” as did foreign media; in fact, the weekly mass demonstrations and civil action campaigns fell under a big tent, including centrists and old-fashioned liberal rightists, including many prominent former Likudniks.

In today’s Knesset, the old left, defined by its prioritizing of a land-for-peace deal with the Palestinians, is currently represented by the Labor Party’s four seats. The rest of the parliamentary opposition to Netanyahu’s religious-nationalist-conservative government is comprised of two Arab parties (ten seats) and both center and center-right parties opposing the post-liberal direction of the current government. At the time of this writing, a center-right party made up entirely of former Likudniks opposed to its new orientation is on the verge of joining the coalition in the name of “national unity.” Notably however, it is retaining its opposition to the judicial “reform” proposals and has been assured of the right to continue to vote against those measures.

Since the horrors of October 7, 2023, these issues have understandably taken a back seat in the public discourse. The pressing need to defeat Hamas, Hezbollah, and their Iranian sponsor has taken center stage. Nevertheless, the return in recent months to massive anti-government protests, ostensibly about Netanyahu’s alleged sabotaging of a hostage deal, also reflects the deeper political divide that predates this current crisis. Whether the divide endures beyond the political life of the current prime minister remains to be seen, but we will not quickly be returning to the old “left-right” divide.

October 7 has only pushed more Israelis away from the leftist agenda of urgently moving toward a two-state solution with the Palestinians. According to polls, if an election were held today, the only possible coalition would be one dominated by liberal nationalist, centrist, and right-wing parties. Netanyahu’s Likud and the ultra-Orthodox and far-right parties that make up his current coalition would all be sitting in the parliamentary opposition. If Netanyahu were to resign (or be forced out) and the Likud reverted to its previous, liberal incarnation, the Likud would also be part of this center/right coalition.

At present, the general perception of Israel is that it’s an increasingly “right-wing” society. This is not quite right. It has certainly become not left-wing, as I’ve discussed. It is a hawkish society, unwilling to take the additional risks for peace that many of our friends say we must, because we’ve had our fingers burned once too often: in the flames of the Second Intifada and, more recently, in the hell of Hamas’s medieval barbarism. Israeli society believes in a strong military because without one we would simply not survive in this part of the world. It is also a society where religion is more important to more people than in most Western countries; because we’re patriotic, and (for Israel’s Jewish majority at least) our national identity is tied up with religious traditions and customs.

But we also care deeply about individual freedom. The illiberal parties of the far-right and the ultra-Orthodox combined are currently polling at around 20 percent of the country. The dominant party for so many years, the Likud, which historically attracted the moderate right, started dropping in the polls not just since October 7, 2023—though the drop got steeper then—but actually nine months earlier, after the judicial reform proposals were first announced. In this light, when I interviewed Hungarian and Polish activists who had fought against the growing authoritarianism in their countries, they expressed envy and admiration for how so many ordinary Israelis had come out onto the streets in the name of freedom and democracy.

I began this essay stressing just how different Israeli politics is from its American counterpart. In fact, the liberal-yet-proudly-patriotic sensibility that is instinctive to so many Israelis could provide a model for the United States, and for other democracies where ultra-progressivism and/or populist nationalism have disfigured the politics.1

In my next essay in this series, I will explain how.

Topics: Israel Initiative

Paul Gross is a Senior Fellow at the Menachem Begin Heritage Center in Jerusalem, but he is writing here in a personal capacity. Previously, Gross served as speechwriter for Israel’s Ambassador to the UK. He holds an MA in Middle East Politics from the University of London, and lectures widely on Israeli history and politics. His numerous published research articles and op-eds have appeared in a variety of media outlets in Israel, the UK, the US and Canada, including the Jerusalem Post, Haaretz, Fathom, The American Interest, and Persuasion. He was an active participant in the protest movement against judicial reform in Israel from December 2022 to October 2023. Gross appeared on the TPPI Podcast with Gabriel Noah Brahm earlier this year.

In European politics, it has become fashionable to speak of a “firewall against the right,” as the Social Democrats and Greens in the European Parliament recently put it, in view of the success of the populist to extreme right at the ballot box. We read, for example, that the two parties wish to build a firewall against the new far-right group Patriots for Europe. They must “stand in isolation”—the “firewall to the right must be firm.”

As an Austrian whose personal memory of all the Nazi scandals in our country goes back to the mid-1960s, I must skeptically object that there is often the will to do so but, unfortunately, not so often the work. The long history of Austrian Nazi scandals since 1945 has now been enriched by two important and qualitatively new episodes, whose dynamics and prospects for development extend far beyond Austria’s borders, and which are almost symptomatic of the malaise in which the free world has found itself since October 7, 2023, the day of the Hamas attack on Israel. It should come as no surprise that antisemitism is now not only endemic on the extreme political right but also rears its head like a hydra on the political left. For those who look at these phenomena systematically, this should not be the least bit surprising.

The process described here is even more dismal because in recent years, under the foreign policy leadership of the Christian democratic-conservative Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP), Austria has developed a decidedly pro-Israeli foreign policy and strived to maintain good relations with the Jewish community. This has meant, among other things, that the Austrian Parliament was resplendent in Israel’s colors on October 7, 2024, the anniversary of the Hamas massacre.

On September 29, 2024, Austria elected a new parliament, and the German nationalist, right-wing Freedom Party (FPÖ) became the strongest party in our Republic for the first time. The veritable cabinet of horrors of the far-right and neo-Nazi incidents that have characterized this party since 1975 are on view in the German-language edition of Wikipedia.

The thousandth “incident,” if you like, since the 1950s that is now unfolding before our eyes is, to put it in good Austrian terms, something. The new parliament, with the FPÖ as the strongest party, needs a “Speaker” (in Austrian political jargon, this is called the National Council President), who, according to our constitution, holds the highest office in the country after the Federal President.

Of all people, the FPÖ nominated Walter Christian Rosenkranz: born in 1962, Doctor of Law, former contract employee of the Ministry of Defense, longtime member of the National Council, and former Ombudsman. Is he a “Speaker” of Parliament who deserves the high dignity of his office?

Rosenkranz is still a member of a German nationalist fraternity the Libertas, which forbids Jews from becoming members, in the style of the antisemites of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (see the articles linked here for quotations in the next two paragraphs). Founded in 1860, the fraternity introduced the “Aryan paragraph” as early as 1878, making it the inglorious first fraternity of its kind in Austria. As late as 1967, the official Libertas commemorative publication stated that denazification and the rejection of Nazi ideology after 1945 was a “fight against Germanness in general.” Racist antisemitism is now downplayed and legitimized by Libertas as “resistance against the influence of Judaism in the cultural and economic field.” In February 2009, it became known that Libertas had awarded its “Carl von Hochenegg Prize” (“for outstanding deeds in the spirit of the national-freedom idea”) to the neo-Nazi Bund Freier Jugend (BFJ). In its justification, Libertas stated: “Through its rallies and events, which are highly publicized by the population, the BFJ has courageously claimed a field that is otherwise almost exclusively reserved for the left; the BFJ is exposed to the strongest state repression for its popular activities.”

Against this background, it is not surprising that Libertas is organized in the Burschenschaftliche Gemeinschaft, the core of the Deutsche Burschenschaft (DB), which is dominated by militant right-wing extremists. At the height of the internal DB dispute over the continued validity of the “Aryan paragraph,” Libertas was significantly among those far-right fraternities that published a “Declaration on the nation-based concept of the fatherland” in the Burschenschaftliche Blätter (February 2011), which protested “against any attempt to declare as dispensable [the principle of] descent as a necessary prerequisite for German ethnicity in general or in individual cases.” Such a “betrayal” would force the fraternity to “give up its inner essence.”

Incidentally, on the website of Libertas, the flag of Germany rather than the Austrian flag is emblazoned on its clubhouse—as if thoughts of an “Anschluss” to the “Reich” were still worth striving for. It is to be hoped that the counterintelligence of our security forces will notice that this association also helps in joining the Austrian Armed Forces as an officer.

One very clear and comprehensible event offers a view of the entire brown swamp that is Rosenkranz’s political environment. In the article “Die Deutschen Burschenschaften Österreichs in der Ersten Republik und im Ständestaat1918–1938,” in the anthology 150 Jahre Burschenschaften in Österreich, Rosenkranz described the Nazi “blood judge” Johann Karl Stich (1888–1955) as a “pillar of society” (Leistungsträger). However, Stich had already been a founding member of the Krems branch of the German National Socialist Workers’ Party (DNSAP) in July 1919 (the party was folded into the NSDAP after the 1938 annexation). Following the Anschluss, Stich became SA standard-bearer and general prosecutor for the Nazi judiciary in Vienna. His crimes included the shooting of more than forty political prisoners on April 15, 1945, in Stein an der Donau, as well as his role as prosecutor on April 13, 1945, against seventeen Austrian resistance fighters, including the Kirchl-Trauttmansdorff resistance group, all of whom were executed.

So Rosenkranz is supposed to play a central role in strengthening democratic awareness in times of growing totalitarian threats? And as a member of a fraternity with a still-existing Aryan paragraph, is he supposed to credibly combat antisemitism? On June 18, 1948, his social pillar Johann Stich was sentenced to eight years in prison by the young Austrian Second Republic at the Regional Court for Criminal Matters in Vienna for his Nazi crimes.

A second brown scandal in Austria in recent weeks is all the sadder because the perpetrator was unfortunately the very founder of the Alliance for Democracy and Respect, which sought to mobilize against the FPÖ in the recent September elections. The episode is even more shocking because, like a bolt from the blue, a world-famous Austrian economist—and initiator of a civil society initiative against the extreme right—now appears to be an Israel-hater and left-wing antisemite.

In the left-liberal Standard, we read that the primary aim of Schulmeister’s initiative was to prevent the right-wing FPÖ from joining the government in the next federal government. FPÖ leader Herbert Kickl was “quite obviously preparing to take power,” Schulmeister explained. Before the National Council elections on September 29, it was surely necessary to draw attention to the dangers of “blue” (FPÖ) government participation on a large scale. Yet what good is all this if the firefighters themselves now become antisemitic arsonists?

Born in 1947, Schulmeister was a researcher at the Austrian Institute of Economic Research from 1972 to 2012. On October 7, 2024, the anniversary of the Hamas pogroms in Israel, and during the Jewish High Holidays, he reposted a tweet featuring a picture of Joseph Goebbels—unfortunately, you read that correctly—with the outrageous insinuation that the State of Israel would use Goebbels’s “playbook.” He also retweeted a mocking picture of an Orthodox Jew at prayer with the caption “After we stole their land and killed their children, they are now resisting” (see here, here, here, and here).

Reactions to this antisemitic scandal were limited, and the left-liberal to left-leaning weekly newspaper Falter, for example, in which Schulmeister, as in so many other media, liked to create an echo, tried to play down the whole affair. Schulmeister is just an honorable left-liberal, anyway, and not an antisemite at all! He just messed up! “The poor boy in the dark forest,” was indeed my first thought when I read his later apologia.

But Schulmeister should have known better, not only as chairman of the Alliance for Democracy and Respect, which has warned against FPÖ participation in government and to which numerous personalities from Austria’s Catholic civil society belong, but also as a world-renowned academic. There is no excuse. He inflicted pain and fear on Jews at a time of existential need.

Schulmeister has been honored many times over for his decades of work. He received the 2018 Bruno Kreisky Prize for the Political Book, as well as the 2020 Keynes Society Science Prize, and even, in 2013, the Austrian Cross of Honor for Science and Art, First Class. His writings have been published by ÖGB-Verlag and Picus-Verlag, among others, and his Wikipedia pages were accessed 7661 times last year. He is the pop star of left-liberal political economy in Austria. His scandal reflects upon the entire Austrian intellectual and cultural establishment.

The scandal also, and above all, reflects upon the left-liberal and left-leaning part of Austrian Catholicism. In his student days, Stephan Schulmeister was organized in the Catholic student association Österreichischer Cartellverband and expressed solidarity with the Allende government in Chile. In 1973, after Cardinal Henriquez celebrated a Te Deum for the dictator Pinochet, he resigned from the church, but he still likes to quote from Pope Francis’s encyclicals.

As the Austrian political scientist Anton Pelinka, who has apparently once again demonstrated his prophetic and seismological ability to predict tectonic shifts in Austrian society, said in his interview in the Furche about the toxic debates of the Second Republic, it is striking that Schulmeister’s fundamental conflict with his famous father, the journalist Otto Schulmeister, was not because of the latter’s role as a propaganda officer for the Third Reich, but because of his support for the Vietnam War. It seems symptomatic that the generation of 1968 and the subsequent “Chile generation” vehemently fought against the crimes of “imperialism” (with and without quotation marks), but hardly problematized the role of their fathers in the Wehrmacht, the SS, and the other terrorist apparatuses of the Nazi regime.

Among the supporters of the Hamas-affiliated GAZA list, which received more than 19,376 votes too many in the recent Austrian National Council elections, are unfortunately also some representatives of the left-wing Catholic segment.

Yet Christians are called to stand in solidarity with Israel in the Jewish state’s most difficult hour. In Acts 1:6–8, we read the last words of Jesus of Nazareth, which refer precisely to the reestablishment of Israel; and in the Magnificat (Luke 1:46b–55) Mary states the Most High will take care of his servant Israel.

Instead of swimming in the brown cesspool of social networks and sharing their content, an internationally recognized Austrian scientist should have informed himself about current events in the Middle East by consulting the items on the Middle East in the Think Tank Review of the freely accessible library of the Council of the European Union, or at the leading Middle East think tanks in Israel and the world. Instead, he has done great damage not only to the cause of Catholicism in Austria but also to the reputation of Austrian science and the reputation of his former employer, the Austrian Institute of Economic Research. And for the Jews of Austria, the pain of the antisemitic attack by a distinguished Austrian scientist remains.

These two scandals cast long, dark shadows over Austria, yet I still believe in the power of renewal through civil society—not least through the well-organized ecumenism of world religions in our country.

[On October 24, 2024, Walter Rosenkranz received 100 votes out of 183 deputies and was elected as the new Speaker of the Austrian Parliament. —ed.]

Topics: Israel Initiative

Arno Tausch is Visiting Professor of Political Studies and Governance, University of the Free State, Bloemfontein, South Africa.