If the essence of “the political” is the binding together of a collective across social difference then what one would otherwise call politics today in the Age of Trump and Musk is distinctly anti-political. Anti-politics is fed by binary things. It starts with the friend/enemy distinction and other antipathies, aggression powered by hate and rage, fear and grief. Anti-politics is an affectively charged artifact formed out of supercharged and hypermediated energies that tear apart at the social fabric from the outside-in and from the inside-out. The prefix “anti” is placed before an object of political animosity –a state, a people, a structure– which turns it into an object of hate.
My immediate point of interest is the politics of Israel and Palestine, which has become more and more anti-pathetic and anti-political since the collapse of the Oslo Peace Process almost a quarter of a century ago and whipped up digitally. No longer pragmatic and against co-existence, the anti-politics of Israel and Palestine is marked by eliminationist one-siderism supported by maximalist points of view and an evil spirit of non-recognition. This quality is crystallized, magnified, and extended online. Anti-Arab, anti-Islamic, anti-Israel, anti-Jewish, anti-Palestine, anti-Zionist, and, yes, anti-Semitic antipathies sound off and sustain each other in the virtual and actual world.
We live in the world surrounded by demons (mazikin or damagers). The demons are everywhere in power –Trump, Musk, Bannon, Putin, Netanyahu, Smotrich, Ben-Gvir, Sinwar, Dief, Nasrallah, Khamenei and their ilk.
The anti-politics of Israel and Palestine belongs to a global warp-and-woof in the Dis/Information Age. In the U.S. and on the global stage, our political life is buffeted by forces that are anti-democratic, anti-government, anti-global, anti-liberal, anti-science, anti-truth, anti-woke. The common root is anti-social and anti-human. Enmeshed in matrices of raw power, religion, and technology, the antipathies that today dominate the political environment aggravate in intentional ways the social sickness they manifest. The hatred, rage, grief, and fear at the bottomless bottom of the anti-political contaminate everything with which they come into contact –in countries and in civil society and in the human heart.
Good reason might impel us not to be anti-anything. Don’t be anti-Zionist and don’t be anti-Palestine when the better part of wisdom is to recognize and sit with the rage as a real thing in the world; then step away from the demonic powers that feed off these antipathies, from the demons intent on causing damage and destruction to people. Avoiding hard binaries and political dead-ends is to seek out a soft human core. In political struggle and at heart-rending moments of violence and destruction, these are decisions: to be pro-Israel and pro-Palestine, and if not pro-Palestine then at least not anti-Palestine; to be pro-Palestine and pro-Israel, and if not pro-Israel then least not anti-Israel. To resist the inertia pulling people into an abyss is to intentionally center oneself in society around human fragility and dignity, political intersections of communal and inter-communal interests and norms, social and political morality, the virtue of kindness and serving the public good.
Understanding that power and conflict are, indeed, basic principles of political life, a real thing in the world, there is, nonetheless, a difference to be had between essential oppositional anti-structures and concerted critical opposition. They have different ends in view. The misidentification of the so-called friend/enemy distinction as the essential structure of the political as such belongs to the order of fascist mythology and other anti-social and anti-human manifestations of domination and modern catastrophic politics. In contrast, critical opposition is dynamic and dyadic, reparative, not paranoid or psychotic, not binary and static, not one-or-the-other but both-and. Critical opposition sustains humane society and the value of life, what Augustine called the City of God, hedged in by demons who rule the place of destruction.
