At times like the present, when violence breaks out between Israel and Palestine, it becomes common to observe that contemporary progressives have a particular problem with the Jewish state – and that this seems to be connected to the fact that it is Jewish. The situation of the Palestinian populace is appalling, and it is entirely understandable why Palestinian people, and those with friends and relatives who are connected to the territory, would feel an animus against Israel. Only a Martian who knew nothing of human behaviour would expect otherwise. But the reaction to events in Israel among progressives based in the West in general, whose connection to the events is only abstract, is something different. Why is it that the response of such people to events in Palestine is simply not the same as it is with regard to other tragedies or injustices around the world?
It is not, to be clear, that Western progressives do not seem to care about the fate of the Tibetans, the Uyghurs, the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh, the population of Western Sahara, and so on. But they care about what happens in Palestine much more. And they care about it in such a way as to indicate not just compassion for the suffering Palestinians, but visceral hatred of Israel itself. There is a celebratory, almost gleeful mood that sets in among some such people when Israelis are killed. Among the rest, there is a steely lack of sympathy where in any other similar circumstance there would be an outpouring of emotion. And it is hard to avoid the conclusion that this is because Israelis are usually Jews. As somebody called Dave Rich put it to Nick Cohen, writing in the Spectator yesterday:
Anti-Semites are getting excited by the sight of dead Jews… Sorry to be blunt but I am in an uncompromising mood. They’re not angry because Israeli soldiers have killed Palestinians. The sight of Hamas murdering Israeli civilians has exhilarated them instead and filled them with joy.
And the evidence for this is everywhere – across Twitter and indeed across the streets of many national capitals in previous days. Some progressives living in the West get excited, let us repeat, by the sight of dead Jews. In some respects, it is as simple as that.
However, the explanation that is usually given for this is not, I think, sufficient. In that usual explanation, the theory goes that it is simply the case that there are a number of personally antisemitic people in contemporary progressive circles (particularly within the hard left), and that when violence is perpetrated against Israel, the mask slips and the antisemitism is revealed. This may be true of a small number of people. But the reality is that most progressives are not personally antisemitic in their daily lives in the sense that they are animated by hatred of Jewish people per se or think them inferior. The truth is much deeper than that: it is that the contemporary progressive movement itself, necessarily, is imbued with profoundly antisemitic themes which at a time like this bubble to the surface like poison in a witch’s cauldron, and which cloud the judgement of otherwise fairly milquetoast, mild-mannered people.
Let’s go back to a familiar theme. Modern progressivism has to be understood as a manifestation of what I have previously referred to as ‘political reason’ – namely, that series of rationales which justify the relationship of the governing class to the governed, and hence the existence of the state itself (and the international organisations which come under the umbrella of ‘global governance’). As I put it in that earlier post:
Political reason [is] both ‘individualising and totalising’. Again, this is not difficult to understand, but worth spelling out. The state’s impulse is always to atomise the population, such that each and every individual first and foremost looks to his or her relationship to the state as the most important in his or her life. And this is at the same time necessarily a totalising impulse, as it installs the state as the very essence of society, without which the latter simply cannot survive, let alone flourish.
This is the basis of political reason, but why is it so? Regular readers will I hope forgive me for returning to Machiavelli, who made things perfectly clear: “[A] wise ruler… must think of a method by which his citizens will need the state and himself at all times and in every circumstance. Then they will always be loyal to him.”
Modern progressivism, seen through this lens, is essentially a sequence of individualising and totalising impulses, whose function is to destroy all barriers between state (and global) governance and society such that the latter becomes entirely subordinate to the former, and such that the only relationship of relevance is that between the individual and those who govern him. This is what justifies the existence of the state in modernity: its claim to know society in all its intimate detail, so that it can insert itself into every corner, and thereby render every individual entirely reliant upon it in order to maintain his or her loyalty and justify its own position.
It is no accident, then, that modern progressivism is obsessed with the figure of the victim. A victim, quintessentially vulnerable, is by definition in need of the state’s intervention to cater to his needs. Modern progressivism, indeed, can be understood as a never-ending search for new categories of victims who can be constructed as vulnerable and therefore requiring of the power of the state in order to intervene in society on its behalf. This is how the modern state, and by extension modern global governance, has come to justify itself: it is the origin of modern political thought, the pattern of modern political discourse, and the consequence of modern political doctrine when it is put into practical effect.
It is therefore deeply disturbing for contemporary progressives, who have wedded themselves so thoroughly to the doctrines of political reason, to have to confront the idea that vulnerability might be merely temporary, that it might end, and indeed that it might be transcended – not through the state or international organisations doing nice things for people, but through the exercise of will and cooperation with one’s peers and community. If it is possible to transcend vulnerability through the exercise of will and cooperation with one’s peers and community, then the entire edifice of the modern state as we have come to understand it collapses. Because then there is no need for the state to bestow its blessings, no need for it to deconstruct the social order, and no need for the members of the establishment to man the corridors of its power and subordinate society to their dreams.
And this brings us naturally to Israel and the Jews. In 1945 there was no people on Earth who more aptly merited the category of victim than the Jews, and therefore no people who better fitted the framework of political reason: a vulnerable mass in need of the benefits of political power (in this case, chiefly exercised through global governance). But 80 years later this is no longer the case. Modern Israel is the almost absolute opposite of a victim, and the Jews have repudiated victim status categorically and completely, largely if not entirely through sheer effort of their own. It is not the case that Israel has raised itself by its boot-straps, exactly, but it is true that through collective commitment to a national project it has forever cast off the status of vulnerability, and made abundantly clear that it never intends to re-embrace it. (Indeed, one might say that Israel represents another, older, alternative form of political reason, which sees the justification for the relationship between governor and governed as inhering in national (and religious) identity rather than vulnerability and benevolence.)
Israel therefore symbolises an absolutely categorical and fundamental repudiation of the vulnerablising dynamic of modern political reason and the logic of much of modern political power, and so indeed do the Jews themselves writ large as the paradigm case of a people who were once, as Arendt might have put it, ‘malheureux’, but who refused to accept that status as permanent.
This means that Israel serves as a symbol to purportedly ‘vulnerable’ people everywhere: transcendence is possible. And the progressive movement, so wedded to the individualising and totalising mission of political reason, hates and fears that symbolism as a necessary consequence of its own logic. Contemporary progressivism is therefore contemptuous of Israel and Jewish people almost by definition; antisemitism is necessary to its worldview, because that worldview produces a relationship between political power and the victim, and between state and global governance and society, which – by merely existing – Israel and the Jews repudiate.
This cannot be tolerated. And it is why so many ‘woke’ activists in particular, who are the very vanguard of political reason as I have here described it, are so invested in the subject of Palestine. It is not because they care particularly about Palestinians, but because they loathe what the Israeli state in particular symbolises. They loathe the fact that it is proud (some might even say arrogant), that it rejects the logic of victimhood, and that it emphasises its own form of political reason that is bound up in nationhood and religion in a manner that is implacably opposed to their own understanding of the proper relationship between society and state. The only thing that needs to be added is that anybody who understands anything about the human mind can then see quite easily why it is that those people then behave so deplorably when they see their enemy wrought low.
Three closing remarks. The first is that I am anxious not to be misunderstood: plenty of people who would call themselves progressives, or Leftists, genuinely abhor violence and would reject absolutely the argument I here make. I do not suggest for a moment that the schema I have laid out is what takes place within the mind of any given individual. What I am arguing is in a way even more simple; it is that progressive thought is readily beckoned towards antisemitism and anti-Israel sentiment because of the predicates on which it rests. This needs to be reflected upon.
The second remark is that I do not wish to be interpreted as making a racially essentialist argument. Israel goes against the grain of contemporary progressive thought, and is hated and feared, precisely because its existence suggests that the bundle of ideas which informs that thought is, in essence, wrong – universally, not only for Jewish people. This, I think, needs emphasising. Political reason, which justifies the existence of the state, is fundamentally and essentially inhumane in all the most important respects. The human spirit is crushed by a conception of itself as vulnerable and in need therefore of the impersonal care of the benevolent state; it is raised up by casting that conception off in union with family and community and genuinely human relationships. Insofar as Israel and the story of the Jewish people after 1945 demonstrates that truth (and it does so very imperfectly), it is despised by those whose worldview rests on its denial.
The third remark – and this should probably go without saying – is that it is inexcusable that Israel and its allies, the Arab States, the United Nations and Palestinian leaders themselves have somehow contrived to reduce the Palestinian population to the status of permanent victims, and that it is the hope of all sensible people that one day this situation ends.
Dr. David McGrogan is an Associate Professor of Law at Northumbria Law School. This article first appeared on his Substack. You can subscribe here.
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Just look at the roll out of these pro narrative articles, one after the other, we all know any dissenting voices have been shut down globally since the formation of the corrupt ADL in 1913
We all know we can longer even talk freely about this subject, doesn’t that say it all….
I think the DS has sold out
Sold out to whom, and what for?
I imagine that in this area the views of the writers, owners and those running the show are fairly mainstream.
Exactly.
And the narrative regarding Leo Frank, which was used as the primary reason to form the ADL is a complete and utter fabrication.
For it was his fellow Jews who lynched him.
“They hanged Frank at dawn in an oak grove owned by Marietta’s former sheriff, pointing him toward Phagan’s house.
Local prosecutors vowed they’d track down the lynchers. None ever stood trial.”
How convenient….
Jon, Toby Young’s wife is Jewish – he has spoken about it on the podcast. I don’t think he is “selling out” as you call it. He may feel he is defending his nearest and dearest – isn’t that human nature?
Thank you for making my point DS99…
So Toby Young is a biased journalist…… I’m done
We all have our biases or do you imagine that you don’t?
Bias, or “having personal views” which all journalists do, and “selling out” are two very different things.
It’s like a game of snakes and ladders. Those who don’t get The Game end up going down the ladders. But it’s all good. The balloon will never reach the top unless all the sandbags are thrown out. Interesting to watch.
What was Gertrude Bell’s position?
An interesting read because the author calls out the hypocrisy of the Islamic nations in that Muslims have always killed and persecuted other Muslims, but as long as their common enemies remain Jews, Christians and Hindus they unite in their self-proclaimed collective victimhood status.
”Since Israel declared war following the Hamas terrorist attacks and ground invasion, the majority of the Arab world has rallied in support of Palestine. These countries have a long history of supporting the “Palestinian” cause. However, their support doesn’t stem from the perceived notion of religious fraternity and common brotherhood, colloquially referred to as the concept of Ummah instead it is driven by the hatred for dehumanised non-believers, pejoratively called ‘Kafirs’ (infidels) and shared theological believe of a common enemy.
Conspicuously, the responses of the Arab world vis-a-vis alleged atrocities on Muslims by non-believers as against that of Muslims on Muslims underscores the exploitative and preposterous concept called “convenience of victimhood” to serve the end goal of justifying the ‘annihilation’ of non-believers.
There has been a shocking outpouring of support for Hamas around the world. Thousands of Muslims, regardless of their ethnicity and nationality, have gathered in the streets of Western nations, where they enjoy the privileges of democracy and freedom of expression, to declare open support for the brutal slaughter of women, children, and hundreds of unsuspecting civilians. Be it Australia or Canada, the UK or the USA, the Palestinian cause has seen overwhelming support. However, the same people have never stood for the millions of malnourished children in Yemen, they never cared for the little girls deprived of schooling in Afghanistan, or the Muslims victimized by terrorists in Africa.
The global Muslim population conspicuously lacks concerns for legitimate human rights abuses and atrocities when the perpetrators are their own people. It only unites when the enemy is the “other”, the Jew, the Hindu, or the Christian.”
https://www.opindia.com/2023/10/ccommon-enemy-how-the-ummah-ignores-millions-of-muslim-victims-but-gets-together-against-jews-hindus-and-christians/amp/
Why is it that the response of such people to events in Palestine is simply not the same as it is with regard to other tragedies or injustices around the world?
It is not, to be clear, that Western progressives do not seem to care about the fate of the Tibetans, the Uyghurs, the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh, the population of Western Sahara, and so on. But they care about what happens in Palestine [and Israel] much more.
I would have thought that the primary answer to this is pretty straightforward: there is and has been orders of magnitude more MSM coverage of the situation in Israel/Palestine over the last few decades than in any of the other areas mentioned. You have to go looking for information on the Uighur slave camps, or the latest earthquake in in Afghanistan, or the recent drone attack in Syria with 89+ dead, or the 9000+ recent deaths in Sudan…..and so on and so on. Every battle between Palestine and Israel, every incursion from either side, every retaliatory act has been front and centre of US and UK MSM for as long as I can remember, and I’m old. With that amount of coverage it’s no wonder people are more willing to form opinions and take sides. (FWIT, most of the people I know actually haven’t taken sides at all and are just reeling at the brutality shown by both sides of this current crisis.)
Quite… Powerful forces sculpt narratives…
And the powerful force here is irrefutably Jewish.
Absolutely true, and the same applies to many other ‘issues’. A month or two ago, people generally thought that Rhodes was burning from coast to coast, north to south, east to west – because all they saw in the media for a certain period of time was images of fire and misery. In fact, photos taken from planes showed a wisp of smoke in a very tiny part of the island. No doubt in that tiny part, conditions were very unpleasant – but the important word is ‘tiny’…
Quite. And in sharp contrast – Lahaina. Complete news blackout even when over a thousand are still missing.
Further to the double standards of the Muslims, this here basically sums up my perplexity with the situation. Surrounded by Arab countries, all seemingly cheering on Hamas, but how can you profess to stand with the Palestinian people yet not give the innocent women and children safe haven? Can somebody explain this to me like I’m 5yrs?
https://twitter.com/JordanSchachtel/status/1712139122905690192
https://twitter.com/Sue_Whyt/status/1712190050010878007
British media promoting lies from Israel.
George Galloway with some more home truths..
https://www.youtube.com/live/7ZO80e3O6tc?si=D8qL7hsjuNA8IMf7
https://www.globalresearch.ca/us-israeli-lawmakers-call-genocide-palestinians-gaza/5835760
Some in the US are calling for Genocide in Gaza.
This horror has got the Globalists stamp all over it. I suspect their expectation is that by lighting the fuse the Middle East will go up like a tinder box.
God help us.
Yes, both sides calling for escalation.
This is worth a read to give some
historical context to it all
http://jeffweintraub.blogspot.com/2008/02/benny-morris-on-fact-fiction-propaganda.html
No need intellectualise this. You won’t understand it unless you see it as a spiritual battle.
The ‘left’ as you call them, are those who hate God’s laws,,evidenced by their dismantling of our Judeo Christian heritage.
They make their own choice and will face eventual judgment. Read the end of the Book for a full description.
So is the Free Speech Union renaming itself the Antisemitism Union? If it’s antisemitic to wave a flag which says ‘Free Palestine’ then it must be antisemitic to refer to the West Bank as The Occupied Territories and Gaza as blockaded. Sticking up for the Palestinians in Gaza does not make one an anti-Semite. This feels like the endgame. The central banks have kicked their fiscal abyss as far down the road as it will go. Most western nations are insolvent. The trick is realising that we – the people of those nations – are NOT insolvent. We have skills with an annual output of £2.5TN, yet we are ‘in debt’ by £2.5TN. The bankers print money which will never be paid back (they don’t need it back as it never existed) and we pay them £50BN/year in interest. This is ‘real’ money, backed by sweat equity, services and production. The fiscal train is hurtling down the tracks and we need only to get off the train. We are the only ones producing anything of value. The bankers produce nothing but debt. Time to jump.
James Delingpole nailed it: https://delingpole.substack.com/p/israel-and-palestine-this-time-it
I became a follower of this website when looking for alternative views during the long period of Covid hysteria in the USA. It is disturbing to see the recent trend here towards demonizing non-mainstream views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to the point where protection of free speech seems to be far less of a priority than a full-throated support for the pro-Israel/anti-Hamas narrative. It is one thing to vigorously defend a particular point of view; it is quite another to suggest that those with opposing views should be “cancelled”.