As I write this, Israel continues its genocidal bombing of Gaza in response to Hamas’s attack.
There is so much happening right now, with so many rapid changes, but of course this doesn’t prevent some celebrities from pontificating on the issues. Public intellectuals like Naomi Klein and Judith Butler have issued their verdicts in the Guardian and the London Review of Books, respectively.
Both Klein and Butler are often misread as “the left” when their work is only part of the wan liberalism that marks any responses to the current situation. By “liberalism,” I mean an overall tendency to draw upon a spurious notion of shared values, a humanism that also attempts to clearly define the boundaries between the mournable and the unmournable, and a discourse that exhorts the public to continually examine its own emotions and sentiments in order to make sure that it is feeling and thinking in the most proper way, much as some patients might be instructed to carefully peruse the contents of their shit every morning as doctors endeavour to arrive at the correct diagnosis. In the work of Klein, Butler and any number of others, we see an emphasis on children and morality: there are infants, toddlers, and adolescents on all sides, we’re told, and deep moral issues at stake.
What, exactly, constitutes a “moral” issue is left unexamined: that word does a lot of work in public discourse. Klein creates a shadowy figure whom she cannot actually name or locate: “someone who thinks that Jewish kids and old ladies deserved death merely by living in Israel.” She offers no details at all, no supporting evidence that this sentiment is in fact held and echoed by a substantial number of people in the offline world, but she repeats this assertion often. There may well be, of course, people who hold such views, but here Klein conveniently forgets that many Israelis, and not just extremist settlers, feel this way about Palestinians. And then, like a classic liberal, she insists that the answer is “Love.” Along the way, she demands an “international left rooted in values that side with the child over the gun every single time, no matter whose gun and no matter whose child.”
As to what constitutes a “child”: we ought to consider that the figure of the child represents innocence only when convenient. Wadea Al Fayoume, a six-year-old Palestinian-American boy, was fatally stabbed twenty-six times by his family’s landlord, for being Muslim (the killer also attacked the boy’s mother, who managed to escape but is still hospitalised for her wounds). The child’s innocence here is beyond doubt for politicians and commentators but what might we think about Palestinian children, anywhere in the world, who grow up thinking about and imagining a revolutionary world that overthrows a genocidal regime? Who might take up arms, as they have a right to do? What do we do with the many Israeli children raised to think of Palestinians as “human animals,” worthy only of rapid extermination? When can we begin to think of children as part of and inside political projects, instead of outside them?
Butler is no less unsatisfactory, as they (their preferred pronoun) always have been on the matter of Palestine, on which they have been unfailingly bland. They write about an anti-Zionist friend, an Israeli, in shock over the loss of her friends and ask, “Is there no moment where her own experience of horror and loss over her friends and family is imagined to be what a Palestinian might be feeling on the other side, or has felt after the years of bombardment, incarceration and military violence?” Like Klein, Butler ends on a humanist note that knits all people together, a desire for “ a world that would, in fact, realise the deepest desires of all the inhabitants of those lands to live together in freedom, non-violence, equality and justice.”
That’s nice, but what do we do about anger and, yes, hatred in the meantime? How do we think through those emotions and sentiments productively without constantly being told that we must disregard them in favour of an agenda of “freedom, non-violence, equality and justice?” If we are to achieve that thing we call peace, we have to first allow for the animating impulses in everything that we think of as the opposite—violence, hatred, animus—to exist in the world, to become part of our discourse and our politics as we struggle to make sense of events. That means acknowledging horrors like the killing of Al Fayoume, but also thinking about how we might detach ourselves from inadequate pleas around innocence.
Neither Klein nor Butler are in any way helpful in our long endeavour, a political project that requires us to confront its many complexities and difficulties without melting into saccharine liberal ideas about proper ways of being and thinking. There’s a popular TikTok video by Caitlin Reilly that’s also, without meaning to be, a brilliantly performative illustration of their discourse (and that of too many like them). Here, a white Karen-type woman talks endlessly about how she will not stand for “stigmatisation.” TikToks tend to disappear, so if this gets lost in the currents of the internet, here’s a partial transcript:
What we’re not going to do is stigmatise. Okay? What we’re not going to do—let me say that again for the people in the back—what we’re not going to do is stigmatise. When we as people, when we stigmatise each other, it’s loud. The stigmatisation is deafening and that is not what we’re going to do…stigmatisation is something we’re not going to be doing to each other. And for me, if I see one more person stigmatising, I’m gonna fucking lose it.
I’m still thinking through a lot of what is happening right now. I can’t claim to have a definitive answer to or analysis of what is going on right now, but I do think it’s important to recognise that liberalism, with its emphasis on innocence and morality, is useless.
I’ll have more details later in the coming weeks but for now, here’s a quick update. My weekly essays, like this one, may have to be fortnightly in the near future: my health has taken a downturn and I spend most of my days in outright pain or deep discomfort. I’ve lost a lot of time on some major projects that are due before the end of the year, and I’ll have to catch up. But, in the meantime: please, as always, peruse this website to read my work. You can also find some samples here and here (there may be some overlap). And, if possible, please support me in any way you can as I work through this latest setback.
I hope to continue to move with you towards a more complicated and more just world.
Thank you.
For more, see:
“On Titan, Migrants, and Mourning.”
“On Palestine and Liberalism.”
“Thomas Friedman Is a Dinosaur, and a New World Is Here.”
Many thanks to G. for sending me the Reilly video, and to T. for telling me about the Butler essay.
Don’t plagiarise any of this, in any way. Read and memorise “On Plagiarism.” There’s more forthcoming, as I point out in “The Plagiarism Papers.” I have used legal resources to punish and prevent plagiarism, and I am ruthless and persistent. If you’d like to support me, please donate and/or subscribe, or get me something from my wish list. Thank you.
