In the days since the Hamas attack, the Biden administration has promoted policies of population transfer that could produce another Nakba. It has backed, for example, the ostensibly temporary relocation of millions of Palestinians to the Sinai so that Israel can continue its assault on Hamas. (The Egyptian president, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, replied that if Israel were truly interested in the well-being of Gazan refugees, it would relocate them in the Negev – in other words, on the Israeli side of the border with Egypt.) To aid its assault, Israel has received further weapons shipments from the US, which has also dispatched two aircraft carriers to the Eastern Mediterranean, as a warning to Hamas’s chief regional allies, Iran and Hizbullah. On 13 October, the State Department circulated an internal memo urging officials not to use the words and phrases ‘de-escalation/ceasefire’, ‘end to violence/bloodshed’ and ‘restoring calm’ – not even the mildest of reproaches would be tolerated. A few days later, a UN Security Council resolution calling for a ‘humanitarian pause’ in Gaza was predictably vetoed by the US (the UKabstained). On the CBS news programme
Face the Nation, Jake Sullivan, the USnational security adviser, defined ‘success’ in the war as ‘the long-term safety and security of the Jewish state and the Jewish people’, without any consideration of the safety and security – or the continuing statelessness – of the Palestinian people. In an extraordinary slip of the tongue, he all but endorsed the Palestinian right of return: ‘when people leave their homes in conflict, leave their houses in conflict, they deserve the right to return to those homes – to those houses. And this situation is no different.’ Perhaps, but it’s unlikely, especially if Hizbullah abandons its caution and joins the battle, a scenario that an Israeli ground offensive makes far more likely. America’s support for escalation may make electoral sense for Biden, but it carries the risk of provoking a regional war.
Until the devastating explosion at the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital on 17 October – a bombing Netanyahu immediately blamed on ‘barbaric terrorists in Gaza’ – American newspapers mostly read like press releases for the Israeli army. The cracks that had begun to make space for Palestinian reality, for words like ‘occupation’ and ‘apartheid’, vanished overnight: a testament, perhaps, to how small and fragile these rhetorical victories had been. The
New York Times ran an editorial claiming that Hamas had attacked Israel ‘without any immediate provocation’ and a fawning profile of a retired Israeli general who ‘grabbed his pistol and took on Hamas’ – his advice to the army was to ‘level the ground’ in Gaza. (Once again, Israel’s extraordinary daily newspaper
Haaretz showed up the cowardice of the American press, blaming Netanyahu’s ‘government of annexation and dispossession’ for causing the war.) MSNBC’s three Muslim anchors went off the air temporarily, in seeming deference to Israeli sensitivities. Rashida Tlaib, a Palestinian-American congresswomen from Detroit, has been denounced for leading a ‘Hamas caucus’ because of her criticisms of the IDF. There have been hate crimes against Muslims, fuelled at least in part by a torrent of popular Islamophobia on a level not seen since the war on terror. Among its first casualties: a six-year-old Palestinian boy in Chicago, Wadea Al-Fayoume, murdered by his family’s landlord in apparent retribution for 7 October.
In Europe, expression of support for Palestinians has become taboo, and in some cases criminalised. The Palestinian novelist Adania Shibli was told that the award ceremony at the Frankfurt Book Fair for her novel
Minor Detail, based on the true story of a Palestinian Bedouin girl who was raped and killed by Israeli soldiers in 1949, had been cancelled. France has banned pro-Palestinian demonstrations, and the French police have used water cannon to disperse a rally in support of Gaza in the place de la République. The British home secretary, Suella Braverman, has floated plans to ban the display of the Palestinian flag. The German Chancellor, Olaf Scholz, declared that Germany’s ‘responsibility arising from the Holocaust’ obliged it to ‘stand up for the existence and security of the state of Israel’ and blamed all of Gaza’s suffering on Hamas. One of the few Western officials to express horror over what is happening in Gaza was Dominique de Villepin, France’s former prime minister. On France Inter, he railed against the West’s ‘amnesia’ over Palestine, the ‘oblivion’ that enabled Europeans to imagine that economic agreements and arms sales between Israel and its new Arab friends in the Gulf would cause the Palestinian question to disappear. On 14 October, Ione Belarra, Spain’s social rights minister and a member of the left-wing party Podemos, went even further, accusing Israel of genocidal collective punishment and calling for Netanyahu to be put on trial for war crimes. But Tlaib, Villepin and Belarra have been far outnumbered by the Western politicians and pundits who have sided with Israel as the ‘civilised’ party in the conflict, exercising its ‘right to defend itself’ against the barbarous Arabs. Discussion of the occupation, of the roots of the conflict, is increasingly conflated with antisemitism.
Jewish ‘friends of Israel’ may consider this a triumph. But, as Traverso points out, the West’s uncritical support of Israel, and its identification with Jewish suffering over and above that of Palestinian Muslims, ‘promotes a movement of Jews into the structures of domination’. Worse, the abandonment of neutrality regarding Israel’s conduct places Jews in the diaspora at increasing risk of antisemitic violence, whether from jihadi groups or lone wolves. The censoring of Palestinian voices for the sake of Jewish security, far from protecting Jews, will inevitably intensify Jewish insecurity.
The binary treatment of the war in the Western press is mirrored in the Arab world, and in much of the Global South, where the West’s support for Ukraine’s resistance to Russian aggression and its refusal to confront Israel’s aggression against Palestinians under occupation had already provoked accusations of hypocrisy. (These divisions recall the fractures of 1956, when people in the ‘developing world’ sided with Algeria’s struggle for self-determination, while Western countries backed Hungary’s resistance to Soviet invasion.) In countries that fought to overcome colonial rule, white domination and apartheid, the Palestinian struggle for independence, in conditions of grotesque asymmetry, strikes a powerful chord. And then there are Hamas’s admirers on the ‘decolonial’ left, many of them ensconced in universities in the West. Some of the decolonials – notably France’s Parti des Indigènes de la République, who hailed Al-Aqsa Flood without qualifications – seem almost enthralled by Hamas’s violence and characterise it as a form of anti-colonial justice of the kind championed by Fanon in ‘On Violence’, the controversial first chapter of
The Wretched of the Earth. ‘What did y’all think decolonisation meant?’ the Somali-American writer Najma Sharif asked on X. ‘Vibes? Papers? Essays? Losers.’ ‘Decolonisation is not a metaphor,’ the groupies of Al-Aqsa Flood intoned. Others suggested that the young people at the Tribe of Nova festival deserved what they got, for having the chutzpah to throw a party a few miles from the Gaza border.
It is, of course, true that Fanon advocated armed struggle against colonialism, but he referred to the use of violence by the colonised as ‘disintoxicating’, not ‘cleansing’, a widely circulated mistranslation. His understanding of the more murderous forms of anti-colonial violence was that of a psychiatrist, diagnosing a vengeful pathology formed under colonial oppression, rather than offering a prescription. It was natural, he wrote, that ‘the very same people who had it constantly drummed into them that the only language they understood was that of force, now decide to express themselves by force.’ Evoking the phenomenological experience of anti-colonial fighters, he noted that in the early stage of revolt, ‘life can only materialise from the rotting cadaver of the colonist.’
But Fanon also wrote hauntingly of the effects of war trauma – including the trauma suffered by anti-colonial rebels who killed civilians. And in a passage that few of his latter-day admirers have cited, he warned that
racism, hatred, resentment and the ‘legitimate desire for revenge’ alone cannot nurture a war of liberation. These flashes of consciousness which fling the body into a zone of turbulence, which plunge it into a virtually pathological dreamlike state where the sight of the other induces vertigo, where my blood calls for the blood of the other, this passionate outburst in the opening phase, disintegrates if it is left to feed on itself. Of course the countless abuses by the colonialist forces reintroduce emotional factors into the struggle, give the militant further cause to hate and new reasons to set off in search of a ‘colonist to kill’. But, day by day, leaders will come to realise that hatred is not an agenda.