“This house no longer exists….The house went up in flames on October 7 in Hamas’ attack on Be’eri. I went over family photos and chose to focus on a picture of life that deliberately perpetuates the past – the house before the destruction and obliteration…All the people in the painting are well,” she says. “The house in the painting was destroyed, but Sahar is in good condition and the whole family has been staying since the massacre at a hotel on the Dead Sea.”
[Tigist Yoseph Ron’s is winner of the Haim Shiff Prize for figurative-realistic art for 2019. You can find her work featured here at Ha’aretz. The feature includes the image of Shabbat on the Kibbutz the artist’s statement above, and the story of the artist’s family’s immigration from Ethiopia and absorption in Israel. Paintings touch upon family history and community. The reflective place of the image build up the clear outline of bodies + a washed out and unclear sense of time + the close sitting together of people]
I’m getting all of this from Marc Ponte, a public historian researching 17th century migration and slavery in Amsterdam, Brazil and Suriname. Ponte shared a wonderful twitter thread about the performance of Hester, of Verloosing der jooden by Johanne Serwouters, performed almost annually at the Amsterdam Schowburg starting in 1659. Before that the Purim story was performed at improvised theaters in warehouses and cellars in the city’s Jewish neighborhood.
Ponte found a piece of historical evidence from the city’s notarial department. The case involved the appeal of 4 Jews appealing against an attempt by the city to ban the play. Mention is made that the performance of these kinds plays had long been performed in the city.
Ponte’s Twitter thread runs as follows:
Mark Ponte, https://twitter.com/voetnoot/status/1771451309096386940
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries #Purim Hester’s story was played out in warehouses and cellars around Vluivenburg. In 1722, Salomon Elias Cohen ‘the Fireworker’ was charged with playing ‘comedien buyten de schouwburg’
Cohen felt this was unfair, because this had been tolerated by the city of Amsterdam for a long time. On April 22, 1722, he had four witnesses present to the notary Johannes Vilekens on Sint Antoniesbreestraat ‘near the Zuiderkerk’, opposite Huis de Pinto.
Benjamin Eliasar, Markus Levie, Levie Sijmons and Moses Raphaels declare that since childhood they have known nothing other than that during Purim in ‘packhuijsen oft cellars (…) in the High German Jewish Tael [Yiddish mp] den Inhout of the History of Hester’ was played
The witnesses say that the performances were performed every year without any problems, even long before their birth. One of the witnesses, 54-year-old Marcus Levie, cited the story of his much older (and now long deceased) brother.
The brother, who was born around 1628, had not only told Levie that the story of Esther had been played with Purim since he was a child, but that he had also often performed on stage himself, both for Haman and for others. characters.
In the mid-17th century, Rembrandt also lived in the area. It is possible that he witnessed the Jewish celebrations and performances up close and was inspired by his print The Triumph of Mordecai (ca 1641).
Title: The Triumph of Mordecai
Artist: Rembrandt (Rembrandt van Rijn) (Dutch, Leiden 1606–1669 Amsterdam)
Date: ca. 1641
Medium: Etching and drypoint
Dimensions: sheet: 6 15/16 x 8 11/16 in. (17.6 x 22 cm)
Classification: Prints
To Ponte’s tweet which includes the image, I would only add the following. In the etching, Rembrandt, so utterly Jewish, frames the triumph of Mordechai in the intimation of architecture in the intimation of an urban scene. What Ponte’s post makes unclear is if the etching represents the triumph of Mordechai in Shushan, the capital, or rather its theatrical representation in Amsterdam.
[With many thanks to Marc Ponte for sharing this on Purim]
“To blame the victims for their own suffering is simply an easy way to distance oneself from them. Blaming the victims is just like idealizing them—at best superfluous, perhaps a sign of the difficulty of facing cruelty at all. It is, however, not only undignified to idealize political victims; it is also very dangerous. One of our political actualities is that the victims of political torture and injustice are often no better than their tormentors. They are only waiting to change places with the latter. Of course, if one puts cruelty first this makes no difference. It does not matter whether the victim of torture is a decent man or a villain. No one deserves to be subjected to the appalling instruments of cruelty. Nevertheless, even at the cost of misanthropy, one cannot afford to pretend that victimhood improves anyone in any way. If we do not remember that anyone can be a victim, and if we allow hatred for torture, or pity for pain, to blind us, we will unwittingly aid the torturers of tomorrow by overrating the victims of today. One may be too easily tempted to think of all victims as equally innocent because there cannot, by definition, be a voluntary victim. That may have the consequence of promoting an endless exchange of cruelties between alternating tormentors and victims.”
Judith Skhlar, “Putting cruelty first” in Ordinary Vices, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), 17-18
The last many months have been a demoralizing and disorienting nightmare, a nauseating disequilibrium for Israel and Palestine, and for anyone who cares about the people who live there and the violence they suffer. The people of Israel and Palestine have been dragged by their leaders into a deep and destabilizing miasma of shock and disbelief, grief and rage with no end in sight beyond death and destruction. In place of political leadership, hollow slogans of “resistance” and “total victory” paper over a narrow and debilitating horizon of perpetual war. No thought and no care are given to protecting the human life of a complex social fabric. The mind reels in the constricted and depressing place of a hopeless dead-end turning in on itself, a circle with no line forward.
The only way to stabilize the situation suffered by Israel and Palestine is to build a bigger picture. The first steps are a pause in fighting, hostages home, humanitarian aid to the people of Gaza. Then, end the war, create clear borders and redlines, back this up with regional and international power, isolate and remove Hamas from power, get Hezbollah off the border in the north without more violence, topple the government of Israel, withdraw from Gaza, lift the siege of Gaza, rebuild Gaza and the north and south of Israel, end the occupation in the West Bank, isolate the religious right in Israel, recognize the State of Palestine next to the State of Israel, reaffirm the State of Israel next to the State of Palestine, normalize relations between Israel and the Arab world, secure peace and human life on foundations of mutual security, mutual interest, mutual recognition, and mutual respect.
The big picture and a path forward demands a tripartite common: [1] An international-regional common: Neither Palestine nor Israel can function on their own outside international ad regional frameworks. Ending the occupation and defeating Hamas require cooperation linked to regional integration and international guarantees which are only possible under the rubric of a viable two-state compact. [2] A local moral common: Under the painful gravity of human suffering, the families of the hostages want their people back; the people in Gaza have literally lost everything. They are the moral core of the conflict, a common humanity of hurt. Their suffering is the only thing that matters. [3] A spiritual common: In the region and abroad, people need to resist the overpowering logic of enmity and commit to human life, the image of God in all people.
Violence and death are core realities obstructing any big picture of a human common. For Palestinians there is a one-hundred-year war against their homeland and people, while Israelis talk about wars-of-no-choice. But all the old paradigms are broken, and hopefully the old cycles. Objectively, the catastrophe of October 7 and the Hamas-Israel, unprecedented in the history of the conflict, has ripped the status quo ante to shreds. With no going back, the extreme scale of the catastrophe is creating new realities. With the passing of every week, Israel and Palestine are confronting the limit of their own power. They are hedged in by what the United States, Europeans, and Sunni states are willing to tolerate from either side. There are clear limits to what they are willing to support politically and financially. Israel and Palestine are backed into corners of their making whose only solution is a peace-of-no-choice.
Over here, diaspora Jews need to bracket and stop weaponizing the genuine fear of anti-Semitism at this political moment. Most of our friends and fellow citizens want an end to the war and a decent end of conflict resolution to the conflict. We should take note that radical anti-Israel-anti-Zionism is a fringe political phenomenon; that Israelis overwhelmingly hold Netanyahu and his government primarily responsible for the disaster brought upon the country by Hamas on October 7; that many Palestinians in Gaza hold Hamas responsible for the catastrophe they are now suffering; that for many if not most Israelis, the thing that matters most is returning the hostages. Understandably at this moment, Israeli Jews overwhelmingly oppose the idea of a 2-state solution, but in favor of no practicable alternative.
And all the global and decolonial left in the United States and Europe contribute are imbecilic anti-Zionist slogans. “River to sea,” “resistance by any means necessary,” “abolish settler-colonialism,” and “globalize the intifada” do not reflect in a critical way the immense toll in human life suffered in Gaza. Far away from the conflict with no people at risk, the myopic anti-Zionism cosplayed by white radicals and Black radicals (the non-Semitic left) exacerbate intra-communal conflict. With no big picture, radical anti-Zionism offer no viable path out of this demoralizing morass, no big picture, no vision and practice of a collective good.
Maybe the big-picture common of Israel and Palestine has nothing to do with peace and understanding. What binds together Jews and Muslims, Israelis and Palestinians into a common interest is infinite fear and hate; and the deep pain and concern they separately share, each for their own people, bound together and suffering with no clear path forward.
Philosophers and other theorists distinguish between the wide-open, harsh infinity of space as opposed to the buffered configuration of being in place. This structural distinction conforms also to digital space and place. Digital space is full of malevolent chaos. It is a miserable universe, out of joint, subject to malevolent beings who wish you emotional and even physical harm. In contrast to digital space, there is the place of digital home. One keeps and maintains digital home with and against the omniscience of the algorithm. A digital home creates a sense of place in the larger digital universe. The creation of a digital home depends upon supports and filters that determine whom one allows in and whom one excludes, and under what conditions. A digital home can be a closed and suffocating place or a welcoming place in a polarized and polarizing world, especially at times of political crisis and social violence. Reflecting the commitments and values of the occupant, a digital home depends upon contingent decisions to engage and not engage other people.
I have been thinking a lot about digital home in relation to the politics of Zionism and anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism, October 7, and the Hamas-Israel war. At their best, the culture and politics of Israel and Palestine are always multi-perspectival. At moments of intense violence, it is easy to lose one’s bearings and best judgment when everything goes out of whack in the polarizing push and pull. One can lose a sense of one’s own best self. About Israel. I go to Twitter where I have found a group of people to whom I go for political and moral orientation. The political views of the people I engage vary. They do not all align with my own. But they do not close anyone out. Against all the American one-noters shitposting about Israel and Palestine, the people I engage generate points of view that are complex and multi-dimensional. They are almost all of them rooted cosmopolitans: Israeli, Jewish, Palestinian, American, Egyptian, Iranian, Pakistani, Saudi, British, French, Lebanese, Turkish. Based primarily in the United States and in Israel, they mostly write in English. They are journalists, historians, think-tankers. Many, but certainly not all of them, write or have written at Ha’aretz, the UAE based National News, the Saudi based Asharq Al-Awsat, Newsline, The Atlantic. Rejecting zero-sum politics, they are non-binary in their critical approach to the conflict and to culture.
I grew up in a Labor Zionist youth movement in the 1970/80s. I spent years in Israel during the 1980s. I pursued a PhD in modern Jewish thought and culture with a focus on religion. In the late 1990s, I started going online for news relating to Israel. It was my first exposure to Arab and Muslim news sites in English translation. Twitter has since then only worked to magnify and multiply that online experience. Twitter pulls the eye away from the myopic Jewish-Israeli-Jewish points of view that one tends to find as one goes out further onto the Jewish right or the Jewish left. On the Jewish left, no less than on the Jewish right, everything is always Jewish and all they see is Israel. The Jewish right is blind to the question of Palestine. The Jewish left blames all the terrible things that happen in the region on Israel. The people I follow at Twitter see things more clearly. They help one see better the place of Jewishness and Israel in the world and its place in the MENA. They see Israeli political dynamics next to Palestinian dynamics, next to Arab next to Turkish next to Iranian dynamics. This big view of the world is attuned to the region. It gives one to see that no national community is simply passive, that everything is in motion against and with each other.
A lot of people have bad experience on Twitter because they engage the wrong people. It is also probably true that larger profile accounts attract crazy and stupid people. I can only say that I came to Twitter relatively late in my online life and my own profile is modest. I wanted something bigger and less intimate than Facebook. And I found people at Twitter. I do not confuse them with friends. Most are complete strangers, even as I am on good terms and even friendly with some, mostly online. They are the reason and only reason I stay at Twitter, which is itself a hell-space. They both out and extend what I hope is a larger point of view. I “engage” with these people constantly. That means I like, comment, repost, and quote-repost. I expect no reciprocation and I am honored when I receive it. I engage with them constantly because I like them. And because the intentional engagement with them keeps my own algorithm clean. Twitter knows that these are the people I see online and who I want to see online; so they are the people I see online, especially now relating to October 7 and the Hamas-Israel war in Gaza.
At its best, the short-form of Twitter is a vital-digital complement to long-form thinking. Even as it opens place into space, the medium forces the user to refine perspective, to condense and to sharpen it. When and only when it works well, Twitter makes the user develop complex thoughts more to a point and sense of purpose that are human and home-like in structure.
Moral shock is a complex of fear, disbelief, rage, and grief. In response to human violence, moral shock is both an instinctive and normative motor of human action, one that consumes attention and commands action. But moral shock, in and of itself, is blind; on its own, it determines nothing and comprehends less. It is a brute fact. For its part, the “political” is not the same as moral shock. Political are a distinct and narrow but not separate set of questions regarding action and attribution. What is the cause of an action and what is its end-purpose? Who are the agents to whom one attributes responsibility for an action? What are the internal and external dynamics that determine any particular action or action in general? Questions such as these are painfully acute in relation to catastrophic suffering. What political forces and historical forces lead a people into violent debacle? Under whose leadership and authority do the people suffer, under what ideological conceptions, and according to what kind of strategic calculations and miscalculations?
Setting aside moral shock, the horrific human toll of the October 7 terror-assault on civilians in the south of Israel is entirely legible on its own. The slaughter and mayhem were not irrational acts of irruptive rage, not the “natural” resistance of a people under occupation confined to an open-air prison. Proceeding in logical order from a set of ideological and operative premises, the assault on civilian life was engineered by military-political actors who considered and calculated (miscalculated) the balance of forces and probable outcomes with end-goals in mind. The men who planned and executed this assault understood in advance at least something of the staggering loss of life that the people of Gaza would suffer in the wake of a violent Israeli response. Was this all gamed out? Some here are speculating that the strategic assumption seems to have been that a full-on assault and mass casualty event would catalyze a multi-front war that would draw in Hezbollah in Lebanon and other regional actors, and a mass uprising of West Bank Palestinians all of which would overwhelm Israel.
Bracketing shock at the sheer scale of violence, my own attention to October 7 has been dominated by religion –namely “anti-civil religion” as an analytic category. Anti-civil religion is a type of radical religion. Anti-civil religion usurps by way of violence the public-political sphere which religious actors seek to stamp in their own image. To understand something about this, I found and am posting below in this post reported statements and recorded video clips of open-access interviews with leading Hamas political figures. (The military spokespeople who dominate the movement have said nothing.). For context, I am placing these statements alongside founding ideological declarations of principle by Hamas. Lastly, I would not have dared to draw any conclusions of my own regarding anti-civil religion apart from the work of Palestinian political scientists. The clarity these primary and secondary sources bring together do nothing to dispel, but only magnify the shock of this unfolding human nightmare.
[I]
Assuming that religion and religion-in-politics are neither irrational nor epiphenomenal is to recognize that acts of ideologically rooted violence are rational. The rationality of religious violence in politics reveals a cold, anti-human, logical core having nothing to do with “feelings.” Without an iota of sentiment, decisions that affect the life of a ordinary people are made upon the basis of premises stamped in religious language, concepts, and values. These are semi-autonomous in relation to society. Understanding that religion is inherently social and political, what matters first in radical and also anti-civil religion is religion itself. What matters is the religious interest or motive as perceived, not society or the life of the polis or human well-being. Radical religion presses the life of ordinary people into the service of the holy. More than mere rhetoric masking “real” political forces, the radicality of anti-civil religion is a rigid and ungiving political force that destroys from the inside the society in which it settles.
In its non-heroic and everyday aspect, politics is the loose and banal social form of the polis. The first rule of ordinary-profane politics is to maintain and sustain the life and well-being of a political community. “Political” are acts predicated upon the exercise of power and authority intended to protect, preserve, and project the group interest. Political leaders secure the common good as they understand it according to ideological presuppositions and practical formulations. In the exercise of power, they are looked upon to lead the people out of and away from ruin instead of deeper into it. “Religious” is something else, a highly symbolic mode of human-being more-or-less detached from the semblance of ordinary reality as conventionally conceived. The political form of radical religion (religion at its most intensely saturated) remains set apart from the ordinary politics of human well-being. The primary, if not sole, object in radical religion remains the symbol, the sacred or the holy. At this highest pitch, religion, ordinarily a form of social order, is transformed into a force of social disorder with a curious and even antinomian relation to death.
[II]
The religious ideology defining Hamas as an uncompromising or radical Islamic-resistance movement explains two things about the violent acts of terror on October 7 against southern Israel and the toll of the Hamas-Israel war on civilian death in Gaza. [1] Shrouded in a religious aura of purification and resistance genocidal violence against Israeli civilians was not simply reactive or passive. It forms an active part of a larger complex of ideological principle and strategic calculation that follow an intentional means-end logic. Violence against Israeli civilians is a purposeful act based on notions and principles having to do with the purity and purification of Palestine under the name of divine greatness. [2] A complement to anti-Jewish violence, the glory of martyrdom is the core ideological concept explaining the intentional decision on the part of Hamas to sacrifice thousands of innocent Palestinian lives in its war against Israel. Strategic and calculated as an expression of “resistance,” religious principle overshadows the general welfare of 2.1 million Palestinian civilians in Gaza.
Political analysts assumed that Hamas was fundamentally split in its identity and internal organization after Hamas took political control over the Gaza Strip in 2007. On the one hand, Hamas remained self-constituted as an Islamic-resistance movement committed to armed struggle and the destruction of Israel. On the other hand, Hamas became and remains a semi-sovereign political authority and governing entity responsible for the well-being of the 2.1 million people in Gaza living under its control. Analysts assumed that Hamas political leadership would seek to secure a tenuous and short-term political modus-vivendi with Israel, modulating long-term ends and religious-ideological principles. It was widely assumed that the responsibility of governance would moderate Hamas as a militant movement committed to the practice and ideology of religious violence or terrorism. Political actors and observers thought that political exigency would be the lever with which to “contain” Hamas, once and for all (see especially Tareq Baconi, Hamas Contained: The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance; see also Khaled Hroub, Hamas A Beginner’s Guide).
Islamic-resistance and governance are two things, religion a third component power, a switch that determines the balance between them. An offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, by its own self-definition, is a religious movement, the Islamic Resistance Movement as translated from the Arabic acronym. Saturated by symbolism, the worldview of Hamas is composed of concentric circles around a sacred topos. Palestine is the holy trust (waqf) at the very epicenter of this symbolic map. Palestine is nested inside the Arab world that surrounds it, inside the Muslim world that surrounds the Arab world. The centrality of Palestine is a foundational component of the first Hamas Covenant (1988), which boasts about the clarity of its ideology, the nobility of its aim, and the loftiness of its objectives. (I am quoting in part verbatim). Inherently sacred, Palestine is the navel of the globe and the crossroad of the continents. It is necessary to instill in the minds of the Muslim generations that the Palestinian problem is a religious problem and should be dealt with on this basis. Palestine is an Islamic Waqf. It is possible for the followers of the three religions – Islam, Christianity and Judaism – to coexist in peace and quiet with each other. But peace and quiet would not be possible except under the wing of Islam. The Islamic Resistance Movement [Hamas] calls on Arab and Islamic nations to take up the line of serious and persevering action to prevent the success of global Zionism, etc.
Claims that the revised Hamas covenant of 2017 moved the Islamic Resistance Movement in any substantive manner beyond its founding covenant are not credible. The 1988 charter was never formally revoked. Crafted for international consumption by the political leadership cadre of the movement, the revised charter seeks to scrub some of the militant and all of the anti-Semitic content in the original charter, including reference to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. In 2017, Hamas now claims to promote a model of coexistence, tolerance, and civilizational innovation. It expresses putative willingness to accept a temporary 2 state solution, albeit on a short-term basis. But the rigid core of the basic symbolic structure remains intact in the revised charter. : from the river to the sea, Palestine remains the inner heart of the Arab and Islamic world. Resisting the occupation with all means and methods is a legitimate right guaranteed by divine laws and by international norms and laws, etc. (Here I am again citing in part verbatim)
[III]
October 7 makes clear that armed resistance-terrorism against Jewish civilian targets, not governance, remains at the core of the vision and strategy of Hamas as a religious-political-militant movement dedicated to the violent destruction of Israel and armed liberation of Palestine. In a 2014 study published by the Institute for Palestine Studies, political scientist Khaled Hroub describes “a theoretical justification that goes deeper and beyond regrets or adopting a tit-for-tat policy.” Citing Hamas sources, Hroub explains that the strategic vision behind terrorist attacks is to drive Jews out of Palestine. Meant to exhaust and weaken Israel, “Hamas’s goal has been to transform Israel from a land that attracts world Jews to a land that repels them by making its residents insecure.” By targeting civilians, Hamas would be striking at “the weakest and most vulnerable spot in the Zionist body” (Hamas Political Thought and Practice, 247).
The strategy of violence against Jewish and other civilians in Israel carries a religious charge of its own. This symbolic saturation appears in the words attributed to leader of the military wing Mohammed Deif prior to the October 7 assault on southern Israel. Deif is reported here at the NYT to have called on an online audio message, “Righteous fighters, this is your day to bury this criminal enemy. Its time has finished. Kill them wherever you find them….Remove this filth from your land and your sacred places. Fight and the angels fight with you.” About these words and the charge they convey, all the reporter at the NYT can hear is an as-if unthinking expression of rage and vengeance. What this misattribution overlooks is the character of religion formed out of its logical structure. The genocidal rhetoric reflects a coherent ethos based on objectives and calculations steeped in its own version of spiritual values. These are the sense of place as holy, the perception of time as eschatological, a preoccupation with righteousness and purity.
More than mere rhetoric, religious ideology constitutes the symbolic part of action that overwhelms the world of ordinary politics. Commenting on Deif’s remarks reported in the NYT, political scientist Dana El Kurd notes that these words “[speak] to the fact that these kinds of groups or movements have political objectives that they pursue and the human cost will be a secondary consideration to that.” El Kurd’s emphasis on costs bears special attention. In this statement by Deif and other statements and recorded interviews, Hamas leaders raise the value of killing Jews in Palestine to a primary religious principle. In retrospect, the call by Deif and the crimes committed by Hamas terrorists on October 7 echo the apocalyptic thinking in the original Hamas charter from 2008 citing what is today a well-known and infamous hadith (a traditional saying attributed to the Prophet). “The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. Only the Gharkad tree, (evidently a certain kind of tree) would not do that because it is one of the trees of the Jews.”
El Kurd’s remark about the secondary value of human life in this ideological matrix is confirmed in comments made by a senior Beirut-based Hamas official in charge of external relations. Ali Baraka brags here in an October 8, 2023 interview with Russia TV about Hamas fooling Israelis into believing that Hamas was interested in securing the welfare of 2+ million people in Gaza, while military leaders were secretly planning for some two years this assault on the south of Israel. In line with Baraka’s euphoric boast and also supporting El Kurd’s analysis, Mkhaimar Abusada, a political scientist based in Gaza, confirms that Hamas political leadership had actually been left in the dark about October 7 and were not in control. Again relating to human life, according to Abusada, “The Palestinian people in Gaza have a lot to lose. Most Palestinians don’t want to die, and they don’t want to die in this ugly way, under rubble. But an ideological organization like Hamas believes that to die for a just cause is much better than living this meaningless life.”
As a complement to anti-Jewish violence, the strategic logic of resistance combines with the blatant disregard for innocent Palestinian civilians. The strange myopia is also apparent here in this October 27, 2023 interview at Russia TV with Mousa Abu Marzouk, a member of the Hamas Political Bureau. Costing hundreds of millions to construct, the elaborate tunnel system under Gaza was meant for Hamas leaders and fighters. Palestinian civilians were left without protection in a war they did not start. Abu Marzouk states openly that it was the responsibility of the United Nations and the Israeli occupation to protect the people in Gaza, not Hamas.
The disregard for human life is also steeped in religious ideology. Perverting a central topos in Islam, martyrdom is no longer a matter of individual devotion, as would have been traditionally conceived. Martyrdom now turns into the sacrificial act of a political-military leadership cadre putting other people to death. The values of sacrifice are prominent here in a televised interview with former leader Khaled Mashal at Al-Arabiyah news. For Meshal, based in Doha, the strategy behind October 7 was nothing less than to open a regional war including Iran, Hezbollah, West Bank Palestinians, and Palestinian Israelis. Reflecting Hamas ideology, Meshal places Palestine at the center of the Arab and Muslim world. He compares Hamas to the leadership of the Soviet Union which lost 30 million [sic] of its people during World War II. He compares Palestine to Egypt, a regional power of some 88 million people. Meshal’s comments reflect a religious myopia oblivious to the welfare of a small and battered people whose lives Hamas is willing to sacrifice in the name of resistance and the glory of martyrdom.
[IV]
About violence and death, Baconi cites an infamous statement by Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh before a violent spike in fighting between Hamas and Israel in 2014 that cost the lives of some two thousand Palestinians and seventy Israelis. Haniyeh is cited as having said, “We are a people who value death, just like our enemies value life.” A few weeks later, another Hamas leader is cited as having called on the people to face the occupation “with their bare chests” and to “embrace death if it came their way.” Regarding statements of this kind, Baconi pushes back against orientalist notions that would identify Palestine itself as a “culture of death.” Against this orientalism, he insists that self-sacrifice in the armed defense of one’s homeland is an almost universal political value(pp.ixx-xx). Baconi, however, remains troubled by religion-based political violence. In the meditation that opens his study, he associates decolonial struggle with carnage and fratricide. About Hamas in particular, he concedes, “One has to grapple with the organic thoughts, emotions, and feelings that give rise to a universe that is often at odds with the dominant Western-centric framing of political violence” (p.xx). Baconi allows us to understand a basic tension. Palestinian society is society steeped in values of human life and human sympathy. But at the axis point of resistance, the callous disregard for civilian life on the part of Hamas is ultimately bound up into a sub-culture of destruction and death that is uniquely religious, not “political.”
What for Baconi is the “marriage of resistance and politics” in the vison of Hamas represents what I would say is a distinct inversion of Clausewitz’s famous maxim about war being an extension of politics (see Baconi, p.75). According to Baconi, Hamas adapted the tool of government as an extension of resistance only after the failure of armed struggle to achieve its military goals in the 1990s (p.80). Baconi cites Khaled Meshal from a press conference from Cairo in 2006, “The world will see how Hamas can encompass resistance and politics, resistance and government.” But then Meshal is cited as saying, “Government is not our goal, it is a tool…Democracy is not a substitute for resistance. Democracy is our internal choice to reform our house, whereas resistance is our choice in facing the enemy. There is no conflict between the two” (pp.104-5). Baconi goes on to identify what is, in fact, a structural contradiction, “Hamas’s aspiration rested on institutionalizing the notion of ‘resistance’ into the very philosophy of the order it envisioned.” He cites Musa Abu Marzouq, another leader in the political cadre, who explained, “We are in government, yes, but the government is not whole. We are a government under occupation. We cannot assume that we have a government similar to others in the world. Or as the Americans demand, that we act only as a government. Hamas’s program in government is one which is aligned, which is compatible, with its program of resistance” (p.105, emphasis added).
If the “marriage of resistance and politics” was always incompatible, it was because the marriage was unequal from the start. Baconi contends that “Hamas failed to understand the balance that had to be struck between government and revolution. It had mistakenly assumed that revolution could be launched from within the very systems that had been created to domesticate the national struggle…With its takeover of Gaza, Hamas effectively merged revolution and state-building. The movement’s approach to governance has been based on an effort to situate the notion of resistance at the heart of the polity within the Gaza Strip” (p.242).The stabilization of society requires the domestication of violence, which is impossible to do as long as violence remains at the heart or core of society. It is there at the core where violence assumes the status of an end, not a means.
My own sense is that the incoherence between resistance and government identified by Baconi is bound up with religion. More than a simple instrument or rhetorical flourish, Hamas ideology of Islamic-resistance rests upon an ideology of purity that hardens political violence. Implacably religious is “the liberation of the entirety of the land of historic Palestine and the reversal of the impact that Zionism has had, and continues to have, on Palestinians.” As maintained by Baconi, the maximalist effect articulates the tenets of Palestinian nationalism in an Islamic framing, imbuing a national struggle with religious meaning. It has always been the case that it was the religious framing that “restricted any ideological maneuverability for the movement’s leaders and defined limitations that would make concessions appear blasphemous” (p. 228).Once raised to a religious-metaphysical principle, the violence of resistance is transformed. It becomes a self-destructive force of purification at odds with mundane politics, which is the art of the impure, a civil power of compromise.
[V]
The catastrophic cost in Palestinian life and the corrosive impact on Palestinian life underscore the terrible consequence of political religion. Baconi is unequivocal. Morally bankrupt in and of itself, the targeted killing of Israeli civilians “[threatens] to erode the very social fabric of the Palestinian community under occupation” (p.243). With Gaza in ruins, this now seems more the case than ever. Hamas deliberately subjecting Palestinian society to the crushing power of Israeli state violence constitutes nothing less than an act of auto-genocide that feeds off the lives of innocent people according to a strict sacrificial logic. Isamil Haniyeh, in an October 26, 2023 address, called upon all the “free people of the world” to stop the bombing of Gaza, which he referred to as the “new holocaust.” Then he says, “I have said this before, and I say it time again. The blood of the women, children, and elderly… I am not saying that this blood is calling for your [help]. We are the ones who need this blood, so it awakens within us the revolutionary spirit, so it awakens within us resolve, so it awakens within us the spirit of challenge, and [pushes us] to move forward.” In the same vein here, on October 24, senior Hamas member Ghazi Hamad told Lebanese TV channel LBC that the October 7 massacre was just the first of many, that “there will be a second, a third, and a fourth” attack if the group is given the chance. “Will we have to pay a price? Yes, and we are ready to pay it,” he said at the time. “We are called a nation of martyrs, and we are proud to sacrifice martyrs.”
[VI]
The first level of moral shock is shock before the ugly reality of death: the crimes against humanity in the south of Israel, the death and destruction in Gaza during the course of the war. Another and deeper level of moral shock follows upon the realization that death and destruction are intentional, a part of a strategic-sacrificial logic. No emotion, no rage is heard in the recorded interviews. As reported here, the death and destruction wrought by Hamas on October 7 upon innocent people in Israel and upon their own civilian population was a pre-calculated and miscalculated act based upon a program of a permanent state of war they believed Hamas would win by marshalling Arab support around the cause of Palestine.
Religion occupies a strange and stubborn place at the heart of this war by Hamas against Israel. An enduring principle of Enlightenment political philosophy is that the unbridled religious imagination let loose on society is a uniquely destructive force. (I have written before here at the blog in a similar vein about the radical religious right in Israel, how radical Judaism as a destructive and uncivil political force undermines Israeli society.) It is a common and utterly mistaken notion by politicians and political scientists that religion is a malleable, political instrument that can be simply written off as epiphenomenal. If anything, religion assumes a life of its own, a real force in society. Just as religion is shaped by the political, religion shapes the polis. In the Israeli occupied West Bank and in Hamas controlled Gaza, radical formation of anti-civil religion is a source of disorder and violence. Religious-settler mayhem in the Israeli occupied Palestinian West Bank and the utter violence of the Hamas assault on southern Israel mirror each other. In both cases, the disaster brought to their own people is a pre-determined malfunction of a religious-ideological program. The death and destruction represent a grotesque mutation of religion, where one might have otherwise sought an elementary and vital expression of spiritual life and a human source of moral community in rites and representations before God.
Hendricks Chapel at Syracuse University organized three vigils relating to October 7 and the Hamas Israel war, responding to the staggering loss of human life. A few other protests have been more narrowly circumscribed as political. I’m sharing here a letter to the editor I wrote that was published here at the Daily Orange. I would not have responded necessarily except for two things. The first was that I wanted to reflect on the genuine insistence by activists that the protests against Israel (the charge of genocide, calls to liberate Palestine from “the River to the Sea,” and that justify “resistance”) are not anti-semitic. I wanted to address that issue about anti-Zionism, also in regards to statements made by individual speakers that crossed very clear red-lines re: intimidating and threatening speech. I wrote the letter and I was going to retract it. I did not want to exercise a heavy hand as a full professor. I was assured by the editors that there was going to be at least one other senior colleague weighing in. And colleagues have been reported at the DO weighing in at faculty Senate. And I thought about my Jewish students at this moment.
The editors chose the title, which I think is pretty much right. Here’s what I wrote. I did not go into long detail about the history of Jewish anti-Zionism. The letter is short and simple.
In response to “After hundreds march to support Palestine, Ritter, Groves address ‘reprehensible behavior’ from protestor.”
Last Thursday, activists on campus protested the staggering loss of human life in Gaza following in the wake of the unprecedented assault and abuse of civilians in Israel on Oct.7 by Hamas, including murder, rape and abduction. Ignoring the crimes against humanity committed by Hamas terrorists, speakers at Syracuse University claimed that anti-Zionism does not constitute antisemitism. They did so without understanding what constitutes antisemitism or how anti-Zionist activism manifests anti-Jewish animus.
Binary settler-colonial rubrics and the hostile cacophony of calls to “free Palestine from river to sea” under the banner of “resistance” mean nothing other than the elimination of the State of Israel. Israel is itself a politically and morally fraught, but a central fulcrum of contemporary Jewish life.
The State of Israel was established as a place of refuge for a long-suffering people. It became a national home for the renewal of Jewish life after the Holocaust, an in-gathering of the Jewish people from across the world, including refugees from Morocco, Iraq, Yemen and elsewhere from across the Middle East and North Africa.
As reported by The Daily Orange, SU protestors chanted “Zionism has to go,” accused the SU Administration of aligning with so-called “Zionist donors” and targeted by name all the Jewish organizations at SU at a time of rising antisemitism and antisemitic violence in North America and Europe.
Calling for the destruction of a national entity is included in the very definition of genocide, as defined by the United Nations in 1948. Associating Jews with money and power is an antisemitic staple. The public calling out of Jewish organizations by name is a threatening act. It is safe to assume that most protestors know little about Jewish history or the history of Zionism. Student activists and their supporters seem unable to grasp that it is possible to be pro-Palestine and pro-Israel, anti-Hamas and anti-Netanyahu.
Students and faculty with direct contact with people in the region are reeling from the violence of the Israel-Hamas war, the loss of life in Israel and acute Palestinian suffering. In response, anti-Zionism isolates the larger Jewish student and faculty body while losing sight of principles of mutual human recognition upon which a just and peaceful resolution of the Israel-Palestine conflict depends.
Zachary Braiterman, Professor, Department of Religion/Jewish Studies Program
Zbraiter@syr.edu
This, the utter mayhem today, is the one-state reality. The one-state reality extends over Israel and the West Bank from the River to the Sea, and not excluding Gaza. You can dream about the possibility and the promise of a better one-state reality. But, in the meantime, there is no other one-state reality. This is what it looks like: violent, unequal, and violent. The one-state reality has no way forward. If the 2ss solution is a delusion, the one-state reality is a horrid place that turns people into human monsters. There is no fair and just 1 state solution to the one-state reality.
The one-state reality was the term proposed a couple months ago by distinguished Middle East and foreign policy analysts based in Washington DC writing about the territory. The article they wrote here at Foreign Affairs dusted up some angry commentary in the rightwing pro-Israel community. But the dustup subsided. Because there is no other way to model the cementing into place a single permanent sovereign state system of rule across these territories. Against but open to agnosticism regarding the possibility of a 2ss, the bottom line for the authors is equality, citizenship, and human rights in the one-state dominated by Israel. But this too feels like a pipedream. Because the one-state reality is inherently violent. The one-state reality is not something natural. It didn’t just happen. The one-state reality is an ugly political object engineered by Netanyahu and the religious right. In concert with Hamas, the one-state-reality is designed to scuttle self-determination for the Palestinian people as a basis of mutual recognition. As a violent artifact, the one-state reality tears up all the old conceptions that have heretofore determined the last 20+ years of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
–The violence of the one-state reality tears up the old conception of the Israeli right and religious right. Seeking to undermine Palestinian independence in the West Bank, the Israeli right bolstered Hamas while intentionally weakening the Palestinian Authority. Violent and rejectionist, Hamas was an invaluable partner to the Israeli right and religious right in Israel, which is itself not interested in coming to a peaceful resolution to conflict. They thought that Hamas could be contained in Gaza behind a security apparatus and that the occupation could be “managed.” The conception has left Israel radically insecure.
–The violence of the one-state reality tears up the old conception of Palestinian victimhood and resistance. Naïve at best is the notion that explains Hamas violence as a “natural reaction” of a people living in an “open air prison.” Nothing is natural in politics. None of this simply happened. Political communities are, by definition, not passive. This includes political communities that operate under very restricted conditions of possible action. These conditions were engineered by Hamas, part and parcel of horrific terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians that stretch back to the mid-1990s. Those miserable conditions suffered by the Palestinian people might explain support for Hamas terrorism in Palestinian and Arab society without explaining the terrorism itself. Going to war against Israel in 2023 was a deliberate decision. Counting on support from Iran and Hezbollah, Hamas is an active political agent, the junior partner to a political axis, that undermines Palestinian freedom from the inside out.
–The violence of the one-state reality rips up the conception of the anti-Zionist left which promotes the 1ss against Zionism. This conception is committed to colonial postcolonial, settler-colonial, and decolonial paradigms that have eaten the minds of the academic left. Anti-Zionists are left celebrating, defending, or denying the full weight of the indefensible: indiscriminate slaughter of civilians, including babies and old people, use of rape and abducting civilian, young and old alike. These are war crimes, which the hardcore of the anti-Zionist left names under the banner of “resistance” and “decolonialism.” The violence underscores that there is no viable 1ss solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict. The one-state reality is an unlivable human place.
–The violence of the one-state reality tears up the conception of the anti-Zionist Jewish left whose members must now confront allies in the movement for whom Jewish lives in Israel don’t matter. The anti-Zionist Jewish left centers Palestinian lives. Not an independent Jewish left, the anti-Zionist left looks to create alliances. It sets Jewish life under the banner of Palestine imagined as a place of possibility. Crimes against humanity by Hamas and the non-critical response to it from the anti-Zionist left are a clear index to what the realization of “Palestinian freedom,” “Palestinian liberation.” “Free Palestine,” “from “the River to the Sea” means when put into practice.
The one-state reality is an opaque object. No one can see through its violence into the future. But I do not believe in the possibility of a 1ss as a viable outcome. Because I do not believe that the incoherence of the one-state reality can be made coherent. The violence that marks it is a feature, not a bug. Not for Jews and not for Palestinians, the one-state reality, engineered by malicious actors, Israeli and Palestinian, was never designed to function as a ground of equality and freedom. Undoing the violent one-state reality would have to depend upon the creation of a two-state reality secured as part of a mandate backed up by the authority and power of international and regional actors.
President Biden delivered a powerful speech outlining support for Israel in this war against the Hamas terror regime in Gaza. The 12 minute speech, which you can read here was unlike anything said by anyone in the current government in Israel. First, because the government in Israel under the leadership of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is the weakest and most ineffectual government in the history of the country. The government under his leadership has led the country into the worse military fiasco suffered by the State in half a century. Second and not incidentally, this government is the most lawless government in the history of the country
The words by Biden were spoken from the heart and rested on values. They were the words of a true friend of the Jewish people and political ally of Israel, backed up by real power. But what is the source of power? You can see it here in the words of warning from the American President to the leadership in Israel. These words come after a lot bellicose language expressed by political and military leaders in Israel, including the Prime Minister and the Defense Minister.
One doubts that any of the members of this government understand that power is only powerful when it rests on law, in this case international law and laws of war. This was the point made by the President here in the speech. “I just got off the phone with — the third call with Prime Minister Netanyahu. And I told him if the United States experienced what Israel is experiencing, our response would be swift, decisive, and overwhelming.” These lines refer to power. They were followed immediately by these words relating to law. “We also discussed how democracies like Israel and the United States are stronger and more secure when we act according to the rule of law. Terrorists purpo- — purposefully target civilians, kill them. We uphold the laws of war — the law of war. It matters. There’s a difference.”
These are words to remember as Israel hurtles into an abyss in some-to-large part of its own making.
