Pascal Bruckner A Palestine of the Mind For the radical Left, the Palestinian is the last natural savage—innocent even when killing and slaughtering.
https://www.city-journal.org/article/a-palestine-of-the-mind
In 1974, the writer Jean Genet, an uncontested celebrity of the French Left, whose works extol the beauty of hoodlums, assassins, Black Panthers, the S.S., and Yasser Arafat’s Fedayeen, explained his attachment to the Palestinian cause: “It was completely natural for me to favor not only the most disadvantaged but those who distill hatred for the West most purely.”
For decades now, the Palestinians—or rather, a mythical view of the Palestinians—have brought together two elements essential to this distillation: they were poor, in contrast with the purported colonizers, who arrived partly from Europe (though a million Jews thrown out of Arab countries, beginning in 1948, also became Israelis); and they were Muslims, that is, members of a religion that some on the left see as the spearhead of the disinherited. Thus, during a time when leftist revolutionary horizons were darkening, a certain orphaned progressivism took up the Palestinian revolt against Israel. Surprisingly, however, what originated as a minority preference has developed into a majority position, winning significant support from the highest reaches of political power and from the academy, in both Europe and the United States—and reshaping the mind of an era.
The extraordinary degree of media coverage devoted to the conflict exemplifies this shift (though a period of relative reduction in attention occurred in the mid-2010s, with the emergence of the Islamic State as an international problem). It is as if the fate of the planet were playing out in a little patch of land between Tel Aviv, Ramallah, and Gaza. The condemnation of Israel is first an obsession with Israel. The media focus tends to convey little accurate information but is satisfied to reinforce a stereotype: the confrontation between what is deemed a racist and colonial state, a latecomer in the Arab world; and a crushed, dispossessed people.
The widespread ignorance about this region of the world, far from a handicap, is an asset: no need to know, for instance, what river is referenced in the Palestinian slogan “from the river to the sea,” since the point is Justice, with a capital J. Where Western support for the Palestinians is concerned, we find ourselves in the realm of pure ideas—abstractions—not flesh-and-blood human beings. Intellectuals, students, and politicians look to this east coast of the Mediterranean less to investigate a specific antagonism—a litigation over real estate between two landowners with historical claims—than to redress a grievance against Western culture.
The actual fate of millions of men and women subjected to daily humiliation and to precarious life circumstances, governed by a corrupt Palestinian Authority and, in Gaza, by Hamas, a terrorist group, seems to matter little. The reason: the Middle East has become the site of a global contest for the title of victim—a title that must be wrested from the descendants of the Shoah. Already in 1969, a French weekly of the Catholic Left, Témoignage Chrétien, asserted: “Jesus Christ is with the Palestinians, whether they are Muslims, Jews, or Christians, simply because they are poor. . . . [T]hey are the refugees . . . the true witnesses of an ever-living God.” A close associate of Yasser Arafat said something similar in 2002, addressing the West: “The Palestinians are subjected every day to the same suffering that Jesus endured on the cross.” Shortly after, the editor of Témoignage Chrétien, Georges Montaron, wrote: “In the hearts of all the poor of the Arab world, the Fedayeen are heroes, the living image of liberators. Like Che Guevara in Latin America, the Palestinian resistance is a flame that illumines the oppressed and spreads from each person to his neighbor. Here again, even more than among us, resistance is a synonym for Revolution, and it bears an incalculable messianic power.”
Is such language merely a vestige of a headier time? Clearly not. What has happened on university campuses, in both the Old and New Worlds, since Hamas’s slaughter of Israelis on October 7, 2023, and Israel’s subsequent military response in Gaza, proves that anti-Semitism—the correlate of anti-Zionism—has found new fuel to express itself and to develop. Meantime, hopes for moderating the Israel–Palestinian conflict have been dashed, and the regional issues have grown more intractable.
Two interests converge in the passion for Gaza that has erupted since last October. First, it allows Iran and its proxies in Lebanon, Syria, Gaza, and Yemen to transform Jerusalem into a convenient distraction from their miseries, and to put themselves at the head of the Muslim world’s resistance to “the Zionist entity.” As Morocco’s King Hassan II said, with malice: “The rejection of Israel is the Muslim’s most powerful aphrodisiac.” (However, from the Maghreb to the Mashreq, distrust of Teheran’s imperial ambitions is also present, and we saw what happened during a soccer match in Iran last October, after local authorities organized a demonstration for Gaza: the fans shouted, “We don’t give a fuck about the Palestinian flag!”)
Second, in Europe, the condemnation of Israel, a constant theme of foreign ministries, helps provide a collective catharsis, supposedly exonerating nations for past crimes against the Jews. This is an example of inverse victimology, as if the distant descendants of Jews expelled from their European homelands were now equivalent to the executioners who gassed their ancestors. The term “Zionist,” thrown about by many on the left in Europe now, already signified infamy in Bolshevik propaganda. Stalin used it, along with “cosmopolitan,” to launch a massive anti-Semitic persecution in the late 1940s, which might have ended in another holocaust if his 1953 death hadn’t ended it. And Vladimir Putin is, in this respect, Stalin’s worthy heir, as he has drawn analogies between Jews and Nazis in his references to Ukraine. “Zionist,” which has become an insult, has enjoyed great success as a word in the Arab-Muslim world, too.
But this major difference exists: the new Judeophobia typically expresses itself in the name of antiracism. It rejects any comparison with the sickening doctrines of the 1930s, and even claims to fight against anti-Semitism, but condemns the Jews—excuse me, the “Zionists”—in the name of humanity. Purported altruism, in France as in America, now allows for drawing up lists of “Zionists” to unmask and stigmatize in film, music, media, politics, and business as complicit with the “genocidal state” of Israel. This new aversion, far from being the sole privilege of the extreme Right, is today also characteristic of the radical Left, a feature of the new brown-red alliances that join Bolshevism and fascism—most notably, La France insoumise, the movement led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, spokesman for the Muslim Brotherhood and tireless scourge of Jewish lobbies.
The point is not to minimize the Palestinian tragedy or to avoid criticism of the current Israeli prime minister’s decisions or to reject the idea of a political settlement between Israelis and Palestinians; but it is nonetheless true that the obsession with this particular conflict is striking. The State of Israel is far from irreproachable; it has confiscated territory (though as the result of wars that its neighbors have launched against it); it has its own extremists; and its army sometimes commits awful blunders. But it is a distortion of reality to make Israel an annex of the Empire of Evil. From whatever angle its critics have considered it for the last half-century, the Jewish state is usually seen as the warmonger, the agent of division that slows the arrival of universal concord—the thorn in the foot of humanity.
Indeed, over the last quarter-century, Israel has been blamed, among other things, for global warming, the fall of Wall Street, deaths in the Asian tsunami of 2004, the caricatures in Charlie Hebdo that enrage Muslims, and, most recently, last fall, for a deadly storm in Libya that the weather bureaus baptized “Daniel” and that Tunisian president Kaïs Saied attributed to the international Zionist movement. “Zionism, the criminal DNA of humanity,” was a cry heard in the streets of Paris during the war in Lebanon in July 2006. “Zionism = Nazism” was the slogan sprayed on a wall at the University of California–Berkeley in May 2024. Without Israel, we are told, the world would be better off, since the country puts us all in danger. But hatred of Israel does not necessarily mean real concern for the Palestinians, often used as a pretext for adopting a grand moral stance or for expressing aversion for the people of Moses.
A scene at the gates of Columbia University in early May tells us all we need to know: demonstrators (not all of them students) chant and howl: “Al-Qassam, make us proud, kill another soldier now . . . burn Tel Aviv to the ground. Hamas, we love you, we support your rockets, too. . . . Israel, go to hell.” The Al Qassam brigades, it’s worth recalling, were established in 1991 in the name of a Syrian anticolonialist fighter, Izz ad-Din al-Qassam (1882–1935). They are the armed branch of Hamas.
Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), founded in 2011 at Columbia, helps organize such protests in America. Aligned with Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, the SJP denies the right of Jews to live in Israel and draws on significant financial means for its mission. Funding sources include Qatar, Dubai, and the Soros and Rockefeller Foundations. These “humanitarian donations” serve less to support the Palestinians than to foment militant support for Hamas and to liken the struggles of African Americans in the United States with those of Palestinians in Gaza. It’s small wonder, then, that the Palestinian, for some Western youth, has become the new wretched of the earth.
This pro-Palestinian activism had its precedent in the twentieth century, when the far Left—having lost the USSR, the working class, and China—first embraced the idolatry of Islam. The neo-Koranic enthusiasm of the lost believers in Marxism forced activists into ideological contortions concerning the rights of gays, women, and other groups, and such contradictions are evident in the current protests. One sees the slogan “Queers for Hamas” on walls in Paris and New York, and wonders: Do these LGBTQ activists know that, under an Islamist government, they would be (at best) beaten and imprisoned, or (worse) killed, maybe by getting hurled from the tops of buildings?
Radical Islam has become the last great left-wing political narrative, replacing Communism and Third Worldism. In the category of the good revolutionary subject, the shaheed, the jihadist, the martyr of Hamas or of al-Qaida replaces the proletarian, the guerrilla fighter, the Bolshevik. The adepts of the Crescent will bring the Revolution—or at least the Palestinian adepts will, persecuted as they are by the “Zionists,” and thus bearing the emancipatory promise so often betrayed. To identify oneself as “for the Muslims” is today to wield a new club that one can use to beat the West and, above all, the Jews, who now supposedly embody its worst defects, after having for centuries faced exclusion and outbursts of murderous violence in many Western communities.
This passing of the baton took place around the time of the death of the Shah of Iran in 1980, the true matrix of our blindness. It was Michel Foucault (supported briefly by an aged and ill Jean-Paul Sartre) who opened this game, with characteristic gusto. Foucault had recently founded, under the auspices of the Corriere della Serra, a committee of intellectuals (including me) to investigate changes in the world. Foucault took off for Iran, with enthusiasm; having never been a Marxist, he was looking for some new thrill, for a spiritual subversion that would render the old anti-imperialism obsolete. Faith mobilizes the masses better than any naive hope in the coming of socialism; Foucault found in Teheran the revival, in an Islamic context, of the preaching of Girolamo Savonarola and of Thomas Munzer—what amounted to a “political spirituality.”
Carried away by his new ardor, Foucault ceaselessly celebrated these insurgent bearers of a messianic potential. The Ayatollah Khomeini was characterized by the philosopher as the “old saint exiled in Paris.” In the end, Foucault would see his hopes defeated by the evolution of the regime and its imposition of pitiless repression. Despite his formidable lucidity and his desire to invent a “transcendental journalism,” he succumbed to the exoticism of the Oriental Savior.
Foucault’s twisted vision anticipated that of today’s young people, outraged over the Israeli bombardments of Gaza. While the death of thousands of civilians, women, and children is awful, and while we must be concerned about the absence of any political solution in Jerusalem, it is morally outrageous to champion as the only solution the extinction of the Hebrew state, in the name of an anti-Zionism that is the mask of anti-Semitism, and to threaten students who have Jewish names on our campuses. We learn, for example, that the Jewish American novelist Seth Greenland, while visiting the sites of the Holocaust with his family in Poland, was surprised to read of Columbia student protesters demanding that Jews should return to that country. A Columbia student leader, Khymani James, quoted by the New York Times, proclaims: “Zionists do not deserve to live.” (He later apologized on social media, claiming that he was “unusually upset” at the time that he made his anti-Jewish threats after experiencing online harassment for being “visibly queer and Black.”)
On March 8, the International Day of Women’s Rights, French feminists, who wanted to demonstrate alongside other activists to call attention to the rapes and killings perpetrated by Hamas on October 7, were denounced as fascists by keffiyeh-wearing agitators. (Demonstrations in support of Hamas have become a kind of international fashion week, featuring checkered scarves, hijabs, and djellabas, along with 1968-style protest-wear—Maoist collarless jackets and Trotskyite caps.)
Let us add that Wokeism—above all, in its critical race theory manifestations—legitimizes Judeophobia: since Jews are white, and all whites are racists by birth, in its view, then to be antiracist is also to be anti-Semitic. Thus, Elie Barnavi, a former Israeli ambassador in France (and a vigorous partisan of a negotiated solution in Gaza), was recently denied the right to speak at the Free University of Brussels, for being a “representative of the colonial, oppressive, and genocidal entity known as Israel.”
And another paradox seems to escape the activists: the double standard that governs their exclusive choice of the Palestinians to defend, and their neglect of, say, the Uighurs, the Rohingyas, the Kurds, the Yazidis, and even the Sudanese, who are ongoing victims of civil war (with already more than 100,000 deaths in Khartoum). Apparently, for these Western protesters, the life of an African is worth infinitely less than that of a Palestinian. And this Palestinian life seemingly has value only if taken by an Israeli.
The war in Yemen set off in 2014 by Saudi Arabia cost 370,000 lives, without provoking Western protests. The same can be said of the 400,000 victims of Bashar al-Assad. When Arabs kill one another, no one flinches. When Israelis confront Palestinians, though, the cry of “genocide” arises immediately; let us not forget that the Palestinian population has tripled in the last 50 years (from 1.3 million in 1948 to close to 5 million today). We owe to the great Palestinian poet Mahmoud Dachwich (1941–2008) this profound and bittersweet remark: “Do you know why we Palestinians are famous? Because you are our enemy. The interest taken in the Palestinian question flows from the interest attached to the Jewish question. . . . If we were at war with Pakistan, no one would ever have heard of me. . . . You have given us defeat, weakness and fame.”
The Palestinian is our last natural savage, innocent even when killing or slaughtering. We excuse his terrorism because of his “despair.” He is the great Christic icon carried by the radical Left, and his beatification has been under way for 70 years. But the love borne for the Palestinian is unfortunately only a function of the hatred of the Israeli. The Palestinian tragedy over the last half-century is a result, not just of their corrupt (Fatah) or bloodthirsty (Hamas) leaders, or of their being the pawns of various diplomatic intrigues in the region; what plagues them most is that the progressives of Europe and America, almost totally ignorant of the reality of these people, have transformed them into an imaginary revolutionary cause.
We must eventually try to break the curse of reciprocal enmity: it is up to the Israeli extremists to abandon their dream of a Greater Israel and to the Palestinians to rid themselves of false friends and their deadly utopias—beginning with Islamist terror organizations and the Western groups of the far Left, ensconced in their media and academic redoubts. We now know this, too: the necessary settlement of the Israeli–Palestinian problem will not guarantee Israel’s peace, any more than it will calm the passions of the crusaders of the Prophet, at war with the unbelievers, the lukewarm, and the Kaffirs of the West. We must pursue this just cause, but without illusions.
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