Ideological Incoherence and Nonviolence

The United States, Israel, Palestine, and what is to be made of the genocide of a people

“Indeed, if at all possible, the Palestinian should declare loud and clear that he is not Palestinian. The ‘good’ Palestinian, defanged and neutered, polished and articulate, embracing his colonizer, making peace, is identified by everything he is not.” -Zubayr Alikhan

We are going to be taking a little bit of time off from the Chomsky-Foucault debate, mostly because I’ve found the works of Ludwig Wittgenstein to open up more rabbit holes than I was prepared for and finding my way through the vast and varied swaths of work in these fields has proved to be a mounting challenge. Do not fear, we will return intermittently, but in the space between I felt it would be good to return to some one-off pieces.

With the explosion of violence in Israel/Palestine, there has been a mad dash of experts, journalists, and politicians seeking to get in front of the story. This rush to put out statements, break news, and provide real-time coverage has highlighted a growing problem within information gathering in not just the United States, but also the global economic core. Journalists and those disseminating the news have come to focus and rely all-too-much on social media platforms like X (formerly Twitter), which have now been swamped by more disinformation than ever before, and state media apparatuses, whom have become leading actors in widespread disinformation campaigns. This has led to fake stories being broadcasted by outlets uncritically, breaking news of attacks where there were none, and a clear ideological bias in play that is being reflected in the language used by English-speaking media outlets. The easiest example to point to is the long trend of media outlets using the passive voice selectively, consistently referring to Palestinians “dying” while Israelis are “killed,” with Reuters even refusing to say Israel killed one of their journalists but instead that the missile came “from direction of Israel.” There has also been a complete flattening of what is objectively a mass movement of different ideologically diverse Palestinian factions, who at times have been violently opposed to one another, joining together in an effort for liberation called Operation Al-Aqsa Flood. The English-speaking world has conflated all these factions as “Hamas,” an error that only further reinforces the complete lack of any understanding about the conflict and region.

But why? Why does understanding the different factions of this conflict matter? To answer that, I need to be a bit biting in my words, so bare with me. The United States has long fetishized the concept of nonviolence into an individual moral stance synonymous with pacifism. In a country whose history has been almost solely defined by violent struggles, the U.S. population has found itself neutered by a revisionist myth of the Civil Rights movement and a faux sense of ideological superiority in the liberal project only heightened by the rhetoric of such pseudo-academics spouting 1990s liberalism as The End of History.

“Where is the Palestinian Martin Luther King Jr,” many Americans may find themselves asking whenever there is an outbreak of violence. The answer is simple really, but it is one Americans refuse to reckon with: they are in the same dirt Dr. King was laid to rest in, killed by the same bullets that killed him, in the name of the same ideology which justified his murder.

The United States and its proxy interests have systemically depoliticized its citizenry, starting under Carter and Reagan to undermine the union movement and continuing through today, to the point where there is no imagination, either individually or collectively, of a cause that would be worth dying for or a better world worth building. So instead [mostly white] Americans invent conspiracy theories to place themselves as main characters in a fictionalized struggle, they LARP as revolutionaries defending a “sacred document” that in reality is often trumped by local traffic ordinances, and they remake the history of the world around them to center themselves and their beliefs as an objective good. When actual struggle appears, they cower in the shadows. In academia too, there is a devout following to the religious cult of “the marketplace of ideas;” an innate faith that simple articulation is all that is now needed to come to a “good” and “true” position even when the truth of the matter is more so like Stanley Ingber’s analysis:

[T]he market [of ideas] as it exists today simply fine-tunes differences among elites, while diffusing pressure for change by preserving a myth of personal autonomy needed to legitimate a governing system strongly biased toward the status quo.

Although the phenomena of depoliticization has been a movement led by white elites in the United States, it has unfortunately been the only thing from Reagan’s project to trickle down to the rest of the country. We are a fully depoliticized people completely separated from the reality of the world around so much so that we are primed to believe anything and everything that frames us as protagonists up to and including overthrowing governments and murdering millions to shore up domestic capital interests, becoming the largest collective arms dealer in human history, and providing the material and political support for genocide.

So in a country so intellectually incoherent that an arms dealer telling someone at the opposite end of a gun, sold by him, that they must remain peaceful is considered an “unbiased” and logical position, what kind of perspective have we lost? For the sake of this piece, I’d argue it is the conflation of nonviolence into an faux ideology. Nonviolence is at its core a strategy of liberation, a means but not an end in unto itself. Nonviolence works, in specific situations, but it is in no ways a universal method of liberation. Only in a political system where certain pillars of power can be turned against themselves, where profit motives can become threatened while members of the bourgeoisie remain divided on the moral positions of a cause, can this strategy work and even then it appears to be becoming less effective. Never in history has a nonviolent struggle succeeded from within a concentration camp and in over a century and a half no nonviolent revolution has succeeded without at least tacit support from U.S. ideological interests. If nonviolence then can not possibly be the only acceptable method of revolutionary struggle, perhaps this beckons us to reconsider the Al-Aqsa Flood.

So where does that leave us with the Israel/Palestine conflict? Is it intellectually honest to compare the recent breakout of Gaza, the largest concentration camp in history, with the Civil Rights movement? Or is it a more reasonable comparison to situate the plight of Palestinians and the most recent operation within the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry, or the Haitian Revolution? When one looks back at the history of liberatory movements, the Palestinian occupation is novel in its scale but not necessarily in its form. Norman Finkelstein, in an interview on October 12, described the historical precedent of the Al-Aqsa Flood operation, which began October 7, much differently than one would expect.

As a factual matter, it’s inaccurate to describe Israel under attack by a foreign entity or a foreign state, which is how Netanyahu has described it. Gaza is part of Israel. It's been annexed, as is the West Bank including East Jerusalem. They are integral parts of Israel, as a technical matter of law. Likewise, the Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem, two or three years ago now, said there is one state – from the Jordan to the Mediterranean, ruled by or built on a foundation of Jewish supremacy. So I think the closest analogy to what started in Gaza is a slave revolt.

In the same interview Finkelstein also pointed to the similarities in the American abolitionist movement prior to the Civil War and that of Hamas’s aims during the Al-Aqsa Flood.

We can draw parallels here with events of American history, like Nat Turner's revolt... the most famous of American slave revolts. They [former American slaves] killed a lot of white people, civilians, in a rampage. And Turner is celebrated in American history… Turner by the way was religious, a fanatic just like Hamas. Similarly, slavery abolitionist John Brown imagined himself the instrument of God's will, and… [h]e's among the most honored figures in American history. In fact, he's probably one of the only figures after whom a song was written… that was sung by the Union Army troops during the Civil War.

I of course would argue that religious fanatism, though a partial motivating factor, is too simplistic of a narrative to lay upon both the Al-Aqsa Flood and the revolts of Turner and Brown, though I digress. The point of including this interview and for my somewhat harsh language earlier is to stress the fact that media portrayals of this outbreak of violence are at best negligent and at worst disinformation. There is a moral twinge on all of the reporting, either explicitly or implicitly trying to delegitimize a movement because civilians were caught in the crossfire, because Israel wasn’t given warning, because the Palestinians were violent.

Too often the term nonviolence is used synonymously with a vulgar form of moral pacifism. Where true pacifism is solely an individualist aspiration for one not to personally partake in the harm of others, this “nonviolent” spin on the actual ideology is more akin to a mixing of personal moral absolutism and cynical political pragmatism. “I condemn those who use violence but I personally have no ability or intention to stop the violence being perpetrated on my own behalf.” Is not the material objective of the pacifist to end their own involvement with violence? If that is the case what does a denouncement of groups one has no material investment in actually do besides legitimize a false dichotomy between oppressor and oppressed. A fractured dichotomy where a moral stand against “violence which has an author” cleans ones hands of the blood they continue spill by directly funding a “violence which remains anonymous.” Where the pacifist would call for an immediate end to arms sales to any countries perpetuating violence, the vulgar, liberal, pacifist detests direct violence but is blind in the face of the structural and systemic.

This incoherent understanding of nonviolence then must only be understood as the firm belief that others must adopt pacifism, even if they have to be forced to adopt it through collective punishment.

Even seemingly good-intentioned individuals only seem to be able to call for a ceasefire, an end to the immediate violence, and a return to the status quo. A status quo that time and time again has been shown to lead to little more than ever-increasing Palestinian subjugation and death - pogroms at the hands of illegal settlers, executions by the IDF, and a growth of Israel’s explicit policy of “mowing the grass” in Gaza. Of course the United States regime can’t even bring itself to support a ceasefire as on October 16 it helped block a Russian UN resolution calling for one in Gaza and as I write this, the Biden administration is planning to announce a $100 billion dollar aid package to Israel and Ukraine to address the military crisis in both countries. This is more money than all but two countries in the world spend on their entire military every year, one of which being the United States. Nevertheless these naive calls for a ceasefire represent, as I stated earlier, a complete lack of imagination for a better world, because when pushed almost nobody calling for a ceasefire actually has a progressive vision of a freed people living in a democratic society without an occupation. To the liberal mind, because violence to change the status quo is always morally wrong due to the fact we now live in an age where reforms are the new revolution and the marginalized must simply wait their turn, the best Palestinians can hope for is to not be killed before the moral arc of history eventually turns in their favor. I personally reject that thesis and it is not lost on me how the bastardization of Dr. King’s theological metaphor meant to invoke action now is used to promote apathetic idleness. I do not ask of you to do the same though, I’m not here to persuade you.

All I do ask then is that we in the United States and the greater Western world treat this conflict and the Al-Aqsa Flood, even momentarily, with the same rigor that we claim to treat similar conflicts of the past. If we do, what new insights might we uncover? What assumptions of this conflict may be challenged? What moral reflections will we have to reckon with?

Tomorrow we will dive into the different groups that make up the Palestinian Resistance, what their history is, and what they believe. Perhaps, as I’ve found, it may shed light on a righteousness not previously known.