Left perspectives on the Israel–Palestine conflict
Norman Finkelstein, Daniel Lazare, Eva Porter, Joe Whitcomb
Platypus Review 171 | November 2024
On March 11, 2024, at New York University, the Platypus Affiliated Society hosted a panel regarding Left perspectives on the Israel–Palestine conflict. The speakers were Norman Finkelstein (author of The Holocaust Industry (2000) and Gaza: An Inquest into Its Martyrdom (2018)), Daniel Lazare (writer at the Weekly Worker, author of The Frozen Republic (1997)), Eva Porter (New School, Students for Justice in Palestine), and Joe Whitcomb (Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), former member of its youth section’s Organizational Committee). The panel was moderated by Oliver Chasan. An edited transcript follows.[1]
Introduction
How should the Left understand the present crisis in the Middle East, its origins and its historical meaning? What role has the Left had in shaping these conditions, whether positively or negatively? Is there a Left-wing alternative to the present escalation of bloodshed? If yes, what? If not, why not? What are the goals of the Left in the broader Middle East? How do these relate to the tasks facing the Left here? Which way forward for Palestinian liberation?
Opening remarks
Eva Porter: I am a student at the New School, and this is my first time sitting on a panel. I’m here tonight and eager to have this conversation in great part thanks to my friend Amal, who recently fled Gaza City with her mom and sister. I met her three years ago as a fellow artist. We began a beautiful friendship, and this was the start of my own journey in studying the topic of Zionism, the United States’ relationship with Israel, and the history of the oppression of Palestinian people. As we sit here tonight, Netanyahu gave the okay for the invasion of Rafah, and we should be prioritizing direct action and amplifying Palestinian voices as well as indigenous voices. While we focus our attention on direct Palestinian justice, we can’t look at Palestine or Israel in isolation. The conversations that go on in Left spheres about decolonization are fragmented today. We need to begin arming ourselves against the logic and facts that Zionist entities use against us just as much we do direct action. We need to have a radical understanding just as much as we need radical action. I’m a student: I am still learning about the Middle East and Palestine. There is so much to learn. But Palestine and Israel are both connected to many other topics of oppression and liberation around the world. Multidimensional solutions are needed in our Leftist conversations.
Daniel Lazare: I want to begin by not discussing the Middle East or Israel–Palestine, but rather the world situation. We live in an age of neoliberalism, which began roughly in the late 1970s. It’s a global economic order based on free markets, militarization, and the total extirpation of the Left. This has proceeded in various ways: the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc was one important milestone in this movement, but it has advanced in wave after wave, and, in some ways, it’s actually now accelerating. We see the rise of Trump in the U.S. We see the advances made by far-Right parties throughout Europe. In Portugal, they had parliamentary elections on Sunday, and it looks like the far-Right party Chega will become part of the government.[2] This is a party that is anti-immigrant and based on strident nationalism, Right-wing populism, etc. These forces are happening all around the world. Even in the recent parliamentary elections in Iran, there were far-Right candidates that made considerable strides. One result is the eruption of wars in the last 10 years, which are different from the wars that I knew as a kid, e.g., Vietnam, which was a clash between Left and Right.
The wars today are Right-wing wars: they are vicious, ethnic wars that feature Right-wing forces against Right-wing forces. There are no easy solutions to these wars. The war between Ukraine and Russia is a good example. On one side, we have Putin and his neo-Tsarist allies. On the other side, we have the neo-Nazis of the Azov Battalion. You can argue about their strategic significance, which side to support, etc., but the point is that politically they are close to identical. We see similar wars in Ethiopia, with the breakaway province of Tigray; in the Sudan, which is being torn by two equally Right-wing military forces, a militia on one hand and the established army on the other. And we see the same thing in Palestine, in Gaza. I wish I could tell you differently, but I can’t. On one hand, we have the Israeli government, which is the most Right-wing government in Israel’s history. I should emphasize that there is no doubt that Israel is an expansionist, colonialist, racist endeavor. The Jewish-supremacist state, which was born amid the expulsion of the Palestinian population with strong anti-Arab policies, has gone farther and farther to the Right until the inauguration of the latest Netanyahu government, which saw the emergence of ultra-Right, Jewish pogromists, ironically imitating the anti-Jewish pogromists of Russia 120 years ago. It was quite shocking to see today’s Zionists behaving the same way that the Black Hundreds behaved in Tsarist Russia. There is no doubt that this is the political nature of this government. I wouldn’t call it fascist. I would say it is heading in that direction; it is certainly led by a far-Right, racist, militarist party. On the other side, we have Hamas. I wish I could tell you something different about Hamas. But Hamas is an outgrowth of the Muslim Brotherhood, founded in Egypt in 1928, which in 1988 released a charter laying out its basic principles, and those principles were quite shocking.[3] They were explicitly anti-Semitic, Islamist, and filled with conspiracy theories. To be sure, in 2017, Hamas issued a new charter,[4] which seemed to express more benign policies, but Hamas made an explicit point of not repealing the old charter. We have two far-Right parties that are locked in a death spiral. Despite the bitter hatred on both sides for one another, what is especially striking is the ideological convergence between the two, between the growth of a far-Right messianic wing of the Netanyahu government and an equally far-Right wing of the Hamas government. It’s axiomatic in the Leninist-Trotskyist movement that the colonial bourgeoisies — colonial ruling classes — cannot achieve the goals of national independence, national equality, and national development. They are always conservative. They always mislead the people and bring them to a dead end. The only way to achieve national self-determination is through an international socialist community. This was Trotsky’s theory of the permanent revolution, and Lenin expressed this point in numerous articles, especially in his “Draft Theses on National and Colonial Questions” (1920),[5] where he called for alliances with nationalist parties in the colonial world, but at the same time said that communists should maintain independence from those movements, should criticize them, should not adopt their programs or their tactics, and should always put forward their own program and tactics.
Hamas tragically illustrates this Leninist-Trotskyist thesis in extremis. There are many people who regard the October 7 events as essentially a breakout from the ghetto, a liberatory move, a blow for freedom, an act of resistance against Zionist oppression. I would argue that it was the resistance of fools, and the proof is in the pudding that we are seeing. Hamas lost the war on October 8, and what we are seeing now is a devastating series of blows being delivered to the Palestinian people. Some people are comparing this to the Nakba, which was the expulsion of the Palestinians in 1947–49, but this is not a Nakba 2. It’s a Nakba squared. It is simply the greatest defeat in the history of the modern Palestinian movement. I don’t know where it will wind up. I suspect it will be some kind of massive ethnic cleansing, but I’m not sure how far it will go or work. There are reports in Israel that the ultra-Right, truly fascist wing of the Netanyahu government, which is led by Itamar Ben-Gazir and Bezalel Smotrich — these are people who are committed to a mass ethnic cleansing of both Gaza and the West Bank — are gaining power relative to Netanyahu. I’m being cautious. No one knows how long this war will go on, but there’s every reason to be pessimistic. The expulsion of millions of people from Gaza and the West Bank would be a horror. It would involve refugee camps holding six million people in the Sinai and in the West Bank. This is a colossal crime. It must be fought as vigorously as possible, but it’s hard not to be pessimistic.
We were also asked to say how the Left can intersect with this problem, what a Left-wing program should be. The only solution is a return to the common-terms original policy of a Hebrew-Arab worker state in the context of a socialist Middle East. That seems terribly far-fetched given the enormous hatred that has been unleashed by this conflict, but every other proposed solution is even more far-fetched. A two-state solution is farcical. Any kind of compromise is completely off the books due to the passions that have erupted. The only solution is a workers’ revolution that declares itself opposed both to Hamas and the Zionists, which essentially strives for a socialist democracy in the Middle East. That is the only way out that I can foresee, and if anybody here has a better suggestion, please let me know.
Joe Whitcomb: What most interested me about this question is how it’s become a cause for consensus for my generation. It’s striking, especially if you look at polling in this country. For example, if people are asked whether they support or relate more to Israel or Palestine, or who they think more about, or just basic questions like “ceasefire now,” among sub-30s, it is skewed more toward the Palestinian side, towards ceasefire, or anything we prefer to see more than within any other crosstab. A lot of that is because of how the issue has developed among people our age, which is instructive. I came to the Left from a pretty liberal-Left background, through reading that led to research, and through interactions with a Jewish community. I had close friends within that anti-Zionist mold, which is uncommon in this country. A lot of people arrive at the Palestine issue and the Left in general out of a sense of moral outrage. You learn about slavery or the genocide of the Native Americans in this country, and you have this moral outrage that drives you to the question: who opposed this at the time? It was the Left on each issue that was the locus of opposition to these things. The same thing happened with Palestine. And then I started to pay attention, starting after sixth grade, around Operation Cast Lead (2008–09).[6] In the last six months, “massive” has been redefined, but at the time, there were massive murders of Palestinian civilians through the use of aerial bombing, especially so soon after the start of the Iraq War (2003–11) — and all the reasons given to enter the war — which the Left opposed.
Intellectually, I found myself drawn to this movement as an outgrowth of individual Left values, like pushing to see a better future. It led me to look into how Israel has come to be and exists: it is a modern state that functions on a two-tier apartheid system for different people of ethnic or religious subcategories, and the conditions that it produces are self-reinforcing and drive towards Right-wing politics, particularly on the Israeli side. The political situation creates a violation of socialist, Leftist, and liberal values. At least, in my background in liberal Chicago, it is the kind of thing we were meant to oppose. It becomes particularly irritating, especially when you’re a feisty teenager, that the things we are taught to oppose have become something people stick their head in the sand about, especially in the U.S. and among our political leaders. We have historical examples of those same people using rhetoric like “apartheid,” “genocide,” or “mass murder” in other instances, when it helps their policy. Seeing lack of moral consistency drives a lot of people into engaging with this movement, especially my generation, and I’m glad to see it. It creates, among my age bracket, a stronger sense of affiliation with the Palestinians, affiliation with oppressed or marginalized people — that we need to have a general change in American policy about the state of Israel, and about how the Left approaches it.
I was looking into the history of how Israel is a mixed bag, because the kibbutzim[7] in early Israel were embraced by socialists in other countries as experiments in co-ops. That muddled a lot of the early demonstrations, and the legacy of the Holocaust also muddled a lot of people’s immediate recognition of what it looks like when a native people or a group of people are driven out by gunpoint or mass murder to clear space for a state. Without that context, it never would have been noticed, or at least the Left would have been more hardline on it. It’s interesting that the Soviet Union was famously the one to provide arms in 1948 through the Czechs, when other countries would not directly support Israel. Obviously, the USSR is not the ultimate bellwether of the Left, but it was the most visible part of it at the time, and they were the ones willing to go to bat for Israel. The situation began to change after the Six Days War (1967), after the Yom Kippur War (1973), when Israel established a kind of permanent occupation of the West Bank and of Gaza as well for a time. The conflict had been viewed as one regarding a Jewish state: that it is a mixed bag of values, and that the state, in its occupation, began to degenerate away from any semblance of that. The presence of Arab socialism at the time drove people to reexamine the relationship between the Left and Arabs, and Palestinians in particular. The Arab states were at war with Israel in the region, and that progressed as Israel degenerated away from even pretension of Left-wing values and existing in the socialist sphere. It resulted in the post-Oslo, post-Second-Intifada world we live in, where Israel has consistently gone more Right-wing and more virulent in its rhetoric and attacks, into this situation that should be obvious to anyone who has a basic understanding of the situation. That’s the real understanding of what’s happening to the Palestinians. The rhetoric of choosing sides is constraining. You can look at this issue from the perspective of who is being harmed: how do you help them, how do you progress? In a situation like this, which is degenerating towards the Right, there’s a lot of opportunity for the Left, but the Left has to exist in a way that is intentionally designed to advance and help the groups of people most suffering. Historically, it is these groups that have the biggest response to Left-wing things like equality or — to use a more buzzwordy term — equity. It is this economic progression that we wish to see as socialists or Leftists.
This should coalesce into a singular vision of the future, which is a single secular state for parties who wish to live. I agree with what Lazare just said — that the two-state solution is basically a fantasy at this point. You have hundreds of thousands of violent settlers. If you were to create a Palestinian state, it would either be patchwork or it would be demilitarized with hundreds of thousands of people within its borders who actively want it destroyed. So you have to move from a Leftist vision, the singular socialist state, to thinking about the goals to get there, and that’s where it gets dicier. We have governments that support this state hand-over-fist, regardless of what the populists say or what the polling says. We have politicians that are not responsive in this country.
Then you look at tactics. To be frank, the most common tactic that the Palestinian movement or the Left has used in America is the mass protest, à la Vietnam or Iraq. This historical Leftist tradition of turning out in the streets, making a difference in the streets — I’ve participated in them; I still do. The result of these is that many people get arrested; they get their names put in the system; and the functions of American policy continue to push onward. There needs to be a pivot towards direct engagement with bourgeois democracy in the West. I know that sounds a lot like grinding it out in electoral campaigns where the people might turn on you, but you need to build power with any structure you can — labor, electoral — and you need to have every part of society engaged in a project to end genocide and ethnic cleansing. You just talk to people and convert them. Most people don’t have a moral opposition to this as the facts are laid out. There are layers of ideology that support people’s understanding, but we have the moral argument. It should be easy to convert people. All you have to do is organize, set up a structure to do it, and to turn them into an outcome via that structure that is favorable for the Left. That’s a large project that no organization is currently prepared to take on, although I advocate for one. I’m a member of DSA to try to step into that role. It struggles to do so.
Norman Finkelstein: I’m inspired by the first speaker, Eva Porter. I’m going to depart a bit from the prompt to try and give my understanding of the facts of the situation. Since you have to begin with the facts, it might be useful to try to figure out where we are at the present moment. First of all, what happened on October 7? It’s murky exactly what happened. It’s unclear what Hamas’s goals were. It’s unclear the extent to which the actions that occurred on October 7 were from the top down or whether they were from the bottom and there were spontaneous initiatives. Unless somebody miraculously steps forward from the other side, it’s quite possible we’ll never know. The bottom line is to some extent clear. About 1,200 people were killed. About 400 were technically combatants and 800 were civilians. Of those 800, judging from what others have said — I’ve not followed it closely — basing myself on the good judgment of others, a fair statement would be that a clear majority of the civilians were killed by Hamas and other militant groups.
The more lurid aspects that were tallied by Israel, the beheadings, seem almost certainly to have been fabricated. If you look at the statement or, should I say, the oral proceedings of the International Court of Justice (ICJ), they did not mention the beheadings in their descriptions of what happened on October 7. The Israelis didn’t mention the beheadings. The other lurid headline was the rapes. I would say the evidence of mass rapes is quite clear at this point, and I’ll be happy to go into it if anybody wants to discuss it. There’s no evidence whatsoever, zero, that there were mass rapes on October 7. The evidence at this point is, at best, that there were isolated instances of rape and quite possibly the October 7 event occurred in three waves. The first wave was Hamas commandos, the second wave were other militant groups who assisted the commandos, and then there was a third wave of anonymous, random people from Gaza who entered, and it’s plausible that the isolated incidents of rape were committed by what you might call the riff-raff and hooligan elements that came in the third wave from Gaza.
The second challenge is — once you have the facts, how do you understand them, how do you assimilate them? It’s a normal human reflex that you try to understand an isolated set of facts and try to find relevant historical analogies to make sense of it. I did ponder after October 7, in particular after October 9, when it became clear that a massive atrocity had occurred, to try to make sense of it. To me, the most sensible analogy was to conceive of what happened on October 7 as a slave revolt. Whether you read C. L. R. James or you read our own American history, the slave revolts were gruesome affairs. In the case of our own Nat Turner, he gave the order to kill all whites. He, and his confederates, proceeded to do just that. They literally did chop off the heads of babies and disembowel people. They killed about 61, all white folks. And Nat Turner was a religious fanatic for sure. So when you read the history of the slave revolts, it matches up pretty closely with what happened on October 7. The paradox is that, as gruesome as the Nat Turner revolt was, if you look at the details, the Nat Turner revolt in 1831 was the largest slave revolt in U.S. history. Notwithstanding the gruesome details, the revolt now has an honorable place in American history. It does cause you to think or to wonder: if humanity survives, how are the October 7 events going to be understood in the future?
Now, the third question is Israel’s reaction. How do we make sense of this escalating, unfolding, relentless, plausible genocide, to use the terminology of the ICJ? There are three aspects to the Israeli reaction. The first is perfectly obvious: it’s bloodlust, the desire to get revenge for what happened on October 7. The bloodlust is slightly more complicated, because the desire for revenge is combined with a total indignation: how did these untermenschen, these sub-humans, manage to pull off this operation, as it’s called, in a way that they were able to? It’s very clear: breaking through the gates of Gaza seemed to show a high level of sophistication, which the untermenschen, sub-humans, are not supposed to possess. It incensed the Israelis because it was a fantastic humiliation for the state of Israel. In my generation, Israel was known as a kind of James Bond writ large, with their commando raids — the most famous being the raid at Entebbe (1976) — their cutting-edge technology, including of course, surveillance technology of Gaza, which is a tiny place — it’s a pinprick of a pinprick on the world’s map — and yet untermenschen managed to pull off a sophisticated operation, which astonished them, how easy it was. The anger is not unlike, incidentally, the anger that the Nazis felt at the Warsaw ghetto uprising. They were so furious, even though the Warsaw ghetto uprising was a small affair. If you looked at the rubble that was left after the uprising, the Nazis had leveled the ghetto. It was the same kind of indignation by the ubermenschen, the supermen, when this vermin somehow demonstrates sophistication and technical prowess, which the untermenschen are not supposed to possess.
The second aspect of Israel’s reaction is a critical one, and it’s almost understandable, if we’re allowed to say that in this context: namely, Israel has always counted on what it calls its “deterrence capacity,” which is just a fancy term for the Arab world’s fear of Israel. After October 7, there was a genuine fear on the side of the Israelis, that the Arab world no longer feared them. If you talk to people afterwards from Arab and Muslim backgrounds, there was a sort of epiphany: “hey, maybe Israel isn’t as strong as we all thought it was; maybe it’s not as clever as we all thought it was.” Israel was concerned that the Arab world no longer feared it. The way Israel has historically restored its deterrence capacity whenever it seems a little weak is these high-tech massacres, which were already mentioned by the fellow who spoke before me — most famously, Operation Cast Lead in 2008–09, then Operation Pillar of Defense in 2012, then Operation Protective Edge in 2014. These high-tech massacres were designed not just to subdue the population of Gaza, but, much more importantly, to transmit a message to the rest of the Arab world, that if you get too cocky, we’re going to do to you what we’re doing right now to Gaza. After that spectacular event on October 7, the Israelis now felt they had to do something equally spectacular in response in order to restore the Israeli government or the Israeli state’s deterrence capacity.
The third aspect of the Israeli reaction was the cliché that every crisis is also an opportunity. Israel saw October 7 as an opportunity — and the language is fair — to finally have a solution to this Gaza question. Gaza has been a problem for Israel since 1948. You can go through one massacre after another massacre. When I was rereading my book on Gaza in preparation for a number of speaking engagements, at the very end of the book, maybe next to the last page, I quote an Israeli saying, “we can’t continue with this war of attrition with Gaza, operation after operation.” The Israeli said, the next war with Gaza will be the last. It turned out, I think, to be accurate. Of course, the person didn’t predict October 7, but October 7 was the crisis which created the opportunity, and they wanted to solve the Gaza question once and for all. They have, or they had until they went over the top, an impressive pretext as to how they want to solve it. I would say on the spectrum, originally in the first few weeks, they were hoping for an ethnic cleansing, to expel the entire population to Egypt. That didn’t work out because President Sisi gave a clear sign: “we’re not going to go along with that.”[8] That’s on the one end of the spectrum. In the middle of the spectrum, you would say their aim was to make Gaza uninhabitable and give the people a fait accompli. And then, in a plea, as Giora Eiland, a senior Israeli policymaker, said, “we’re going to give the Gazans two choices: starvation or leave.”[9] That is to say, totally annihilate Gaza, so there’s nothing to go back to. And in large part, there isn’t anymore anything to go back to. You can’t go back to your home in the north because you don’t know where it was. The place has been pulverized. There have already been stories of people who went back and they have no idea where their home was.
This third aspect is the Amalek[10] option — to wipe out the population. That’s the spectrum. Obviously they’re not discreet. The ethnic cleansing bleeds into making Gaza uninhabitable, and that bleeds into wiping out the population. That’s Israel’s objective. What happened on October 7 and thereafter — was it a game changer? I remember my close friend, Mouin Rabbani, told me right after, “don’t you think it’s a game changer?” I said, “not really,” because I’ve lived through Operation Cast Lead and Operation Protective Edge (2014). Yes, this is worse. But there is a game changer in one sense in my opinion. The game changer is that diplomacy is now off the table. The Israelis are determined to get a military victory. They will not accept anything less than a major defeat inflicted on Hamas and a major defeat subsequently inflicted on Hezbollah. On the other side, Hamas and what’s called the Axis of Resistance, now believe, because of what happened on October 7, that a military victory on their side is within reach. That was the belief of people like Hassan Nasrallah, the head of Hezbollah, but it was not widespread. Everybody feared Israel militarily. After October 7, people reconsidered whether or not Israel was as invulnerable as was believed. The other thing is that Nasrallah has set one red line. The red line is “we won’t accept a Hamas military defeat.” And so you have on one side Israel saying, “we will not accept anything less than inflicting a defeat on Hamas,” and on the other side you have Hezbollah saying, “we will not accept a military defeat for Hamas.” That means for the foreseeable future, this is going to be played out on the battlefield. I don’t see a diplomatic possibility or option at the present moment or in the foreseeable future.
With all of that grimness, I have to — not because I’m obliged, but because I think we have to have a balanced picture — give some reasons for hope. The intervention of South Africa was not only spectacular, but it marked a change in world politics. From very early on, already in October, there were many people saying, “call on the Genocide Convention.” I said, “that’s crazy.” What government is going to stand up to the U.S. and call in or invoke the Genocide Convention? I was totally astonished at South Africa, which not only took up the baton, but has been absolutely relentless. If you read their application to the ICJ, it was impressive. And the other thing I would want to say is, I think it’s a point of principle, and it was mentioned by Eva Porter and Joe Whitcomb: the relentlessness of the young people in our country since October 7 has been breathtaking. The fact that you young folks keep coming out, won’t accept defeat, won’t fall into despair. It’s an inspiring sight and it makes me hopeful. Two weeks ago, I was at the demonstration which began at Washington Square. It was a rainy day, and it was a Saturday. The oldest person, after me, was 25. There was a 40-year gap. These young people were just awe-inspiring. The energy, the commitment — as a friend of mine said, they have no stake in this. It’s just solidarity, to use your generation’s expression. You’ll understand the modification: it’s solidarity without benefits. We went down to the subway, because we climaxed at 42nd Street, and they were on both sides of the platform, still chanting, still demanding, and it was a great sight. There’s an interesting question: what accounts for that selfless solidarity?
Responses
AP: I wanted to touch on the topic of direct action when it comes to helping end the suffering of Palestinians. I understand that in the past, the U.S. and the UN in general, have taken a double-sided stance on Israel and Palestine, by providing aid to Palestinians, only to really elongate the suffering of the Palestinian community, and keep their stateless identity accepted. This raises a question: immediately, whenever this devastation ends, how is reconstruction going to work, if it’s going to work? Especially because the people on the ground, who know the community, who are able to build those grassroots connections, will not be considered in that reconstruction process, especially due to the fact that Hamas is labeled a terrorist organization, and anybody who has any sort of affiliation, has made any sale, or has any cousin whose name is associated with Hamas, will not be considered a part of the next phase.
On the topic of hope: the protests on the Left, really just from the youth and people who are holding on to their humanity and watching this happen from afar — there’s been so much time, and so many families separated and killed by these years of occupation, that there’s hope in the Palestinian identity. People I meet from around the world, who have different stories and perspectives that would never be conjured up by somebody from where I grew up. The Palestinian identity remains and accumulates around the world, and this is something that we have to look towards.
I also want to touch on building the capacity to end the siege and blockade of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. When it comes to the Left’s perceived fragmentation, and these far-Right governments coming up around the world, you find that liberal policy also meets it halfway at these weird points when it comes to economic growth. Israel is directly correlated with that when it comes to capital growth and agri-business, agri-tech, the military industrial complex, and technology with unmanned weaponry. Liberal policy does not want to put any restrictions on these weapons. We need to look critically at both sides and not point fingers, and also ban the use of super-political action committees such as AIPAC[11] or the anti-BDS[12] movement that we see. The people who are funding these groups that fund our politics are products of capitalism, people like Sheldon Adelson, the main guy of AIPAC, or his late wife.
DL: The slave-revolt analogy has its pitfalls. Yes, in some ways, it resembles the Nat Turner or the Denmark Vesey uprising (1822), but this leaves out that there was an organized political party behind the October 7 operation. The party is nearly a century old; it has a well-established doctrine and body of ideology, and its objectives were not at all unclear on October 7; they were crystal clear, and that was to spark a general Islamic revolt throughout the Islamic world. That policy has failed terribly.
What astonishes me about Hezbollah is the lack of a response. Israel has killed its top leadership, and there has been a minimal reaction from Hezbollah. It’s true the Houthis, who are amazing, scrappy fighters, are launching a war at the other end of the Red Sea. The Syrian government has put up with hundreds of Israeli air raids, and takes two weeks to do anything in response. Iran, supposedly the center of the resistance, actually called a war council, if we’re to believe the New York Times, two weeks ago, where they called the Houthis, militias in Iraq, and Hezbollah and told them, “we don’t want a war, so cool it.” Essentially, Hamas’s strategy has failed. It failed on October 8. When you’re dealing with a political party, you’re not dealing with a spontaneous expression of outrage and a longing for freedom; you’re dealing with a conscious political strategy that has been worked out over the course of decades, which has fallen completely flat. As I said before, I am profoundly pessimistic, because I don’t see any way out of this. The failure of Hamas shows that a military solution to this conflict is impossible. It’s impossible for Hamas. It’s also impossible for the Israeli government, because even if they do opt for a radical ethnic-cleansing policy of both Gaza and the West Bank, as the Smotrich / Ben-Gvir wing of the Netanyahu government wants, what will happen next? We have 2.4 million refugees in Sinai and 3.7 million refugees in Jordan, which will just become pockets of resistance. And what will happen? Israel regularly strafes and bombs those population centers. How could the war not widen and intensify? Essentially we’re seeing here a new stage in a hundred years’ war, which is reaching a new level of intensity. The only solution, as far-fetched as it seems, is through some kind of common working-class action throughout the entire Middle East, where the population is laboring in the direst poverty amid conditions of the deepest political oppression — complete lack of democracy. The only hope lies in a transformation of the region as well as Israel and Palestine, so that equal rights, democracy, and socialism can be available to all. But I would in no way suggest that the October 7 operation was a victory or success. Yes, Hamas succeeded in wrapping the tiger smartly on the nose, but then the tiger reacts, goes into a rage, and extraordinary levels of destruction are rained down upon the people for whom Hamas claims to speak. That’s what we’re seeing now. We are seeing the results of this failed policy, and we have no idea where it will end up. And yes, it’s great if young people demonstrate in the U.S., but I’m afraid it’s going to have little impact as long as the basic imperial dynamics remain in place.
Joe Whitcomb: With the last thing you said, I basically agree. I continue to participate in these demonstrations. I just am increasingly convinced that there needs to be other sectors or other fronts, particularly in North American labor, which needs to be open to halting the economy. Clearly, getting 10–20 thousand people in the streets doesn’t send as effective a message as we would all like to send to our government or to Israel’s government.
I’m interested in the way you singularize Hamas in this discussion. I’d say that this is a continuation of a long process, and Israel is not in a war with Hamas — it’s in a war with the Palestinian people and the Palestinian movement. The fact that Hamas is the sole representative or the named representative, in the media and in the region itself in Gaza, is the result of intentional selection against the Left. I don’t disagree with you about the particular politics of Hamas or the Muslim Brotherhood. This focus on Hamas as a singular Right-wing force kind of ignores the breadth of what the Palestinian liberation movement has looked like for the last 100 years; it was a Left-wing aligned and influenced movement for a long time through the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine[13] and, to a lesser extent, Fatah.[14] In Gaza now, Hamas are the people fighting, and that attracts a lot of individuals within Gaza, within the Palestinian or Arab world, to support them, but seeing that as a representative of some sort of value set on the part of the individuals, or on the part of the party, is a bit of a harsh understanding of the people themselves. Like Eva was saying, you can’t have a reconstruction where everything that is a part of Hamas is separated out of society because, if you exist in Gaza, in a place where Hamas has been the civil government for the last 20 years, you’re going to have interaction with Hamas. People can’t isolate these people’s connection to a political party — I guess they function as both a political party and a guerrilla movement — from the actual desires and wants they have. That kind of separation can get dicey, especially when you say that this movement or the people who fought for Islamic jihad or Hamas or just came out the gate on October 7 are individualized as a Right-wing movement. That is very isolating.
Who said, “every crisis is an opportunity”? Was that you, Dan? It’s a cliché. I was thinking about that exact cliché regarding the Left itself. I know it sounds heartless to say that every time something bad happens, there’s an opportunity for the Left. That’s a basic idea of Leftism and socialism more directly. It is something that appeals to people because it aspires to a better world. When there are situations that make our world seem so horrible, ghastly, and miserable, that’s when you can find people and essentially move them in a Left-ward — or Right-ward — direction. There are still people who have been moved in a direction, and that is an opportunity for us to move forward.
In the 1960s and 70s, when Palestinian militants first moved beyond the fedayeen[15] stage and were confronting Israel directly, they were drawn to the Left, partially because the USSR was supporting anyone who could say that they were Leftists and were fighting on behalf of Palestine, but also because these ideas blossomed in those spaces when there’s structure and organization to support them. Because of Israel, America, and Hamas itself — including in the ways they’ve interacted within Gaza with Fatah — these Leftist alternatives and structures have been degraded. We’re looking at a situation where people are drawn to the Right, not naturally, but because they’re drawn to whatever gives one the infrastructure to fight back against the horrid conditions of their lives. If there is a Leftist focus that we can have there — not to dictate from a comfortable position in New York City — it’s to develop Leftist infrastructure to take people who are suffering and put them in pursuit of a better future.
NF: There’s a danger in talking in abstractions and losing sight of facts. I’m going to use my time just to go through the factual record. In 2006, there were elections in Gaza. Those elections were called for by our own president, George W. Bush, under what was called “democracy promotion.” Hamas, which had been opposed to participating in any elections because it was seen as part of the what was called Oslo process — considered Oslo a sellout and they didn’t want to participate in any offshoot — but Hamas changed their position and they participated in the elections. As a surprise to them, as for everyone else, they won the parliamentary election. The first thing the U.S., Israel, and the EU did was to slap brutal economic sanctions on Gaza. That was the “thank you” for participating in the elections. Now, once Hamas came into power, there was a rich documentary record. Hamas was moving closer and closer to accepting the international consensus resolving the conflict, namely that of two states on the June, 1967 border. Everybody knows it. Every time they moved closer to accepting that two-state consensus for resolving the conflict, with the one question of where the law was regarding the right of the return of the refugees — it was a gray area — Israel engaged in one of its high-tech massacres. If you know the Israeli scholarship, it was called — I’m using their words, not mine — the fear of the “Palestinian peace offensive.” They don’t want a diplomatic settlement because they don’t want to withdraw. Every time — be it the Palestinian Liberation Organization in one period or Hamas in another — they inched closer to that two-state settlement, Israel escalated its violent, brutal military provocations. There didn’t seem to be any hope for a diplomatic solution.
Then along came March 2018, which came to be called the “Great March of Return.” Initially, it was not a Hamas undertaking. It was spontaneous; it was from the grassroots. It was massive civil disobedience, similar to our own Civil Rights Movement, and the first Intifada in 1987–93. Hamas joined in and gave its seal of approval to massive non-violent civil disobedience. What happened? We have very good human-rights reports on it from Human Rights Watch and from an international investigation committee, the UN committee. To quote the UN committee, Israel intentionally targeted children, medics, journalists, and disabled people on wheelchairs or crutches. It also targeted from the knee down to inflict life-changing injuries on the protesters. That went on for about six weeks. Then came May 14, and Israel committed a massacre. The non-violent option began to be extinguished. They tried diplomacy; it failed. They tried non-violent civil disobedience; it failed.
Then October 7 came. I had given up on Gaza, I had moved on and was writing on other topics. It was clear that the next step was going to be after the Abraham Accords, an accord with Saudi Arabia, and the Palestine question was going to be finished. It would be over. They were out of the picture. October 7 happened at that moment, after attempting diplomacy and non-violent resistance, and after when it seemed like their fate was sealed.
You know what “your fate is sealed” means? It means that in 2004, the head of Israel’s National Security Council, Giora Eiland, described Gaza as a “huge concentration camp.” Most of the folks who came through the gates on October 7 were in their early 20s. They were born into a concentration camp, and it looked like they were going to die in it. Now, about what they intended to do on October 7 — I don’t have a clue. I don’t think it’s clear. Dan says they wanted to provoke an uprising in the Muslim world. Maybe you have a special pipeline to Hamas; I don’t. What we do know is that Hamas did not tell Hezbollah what it was going to do. Hamas did not tell Iran what it was going to do. That doesn’t seem like a smart thing to do if you want to provoke an uprising in the Arab-Muslim world — not telling your ostensible allies what you’re going to do. And they were kind of peeved about that, which we know also; they were taken by surprise. Rather than label Hamas with a sweeping stroke and playing a clairvoyant — “I know what they intended to do” — we should just look at the historical record.
Secondly, show a little sympathy. You can call it a Right-wing organization. It was an impossible situation. I don’t know what they intended to do, but I certainly know, because the factual record is there, that they tried hard to resolve this conflict, either diplomatically or through nonviolent tactics, which, I’ll tell you, I encouraged. It was like egg on my face when not only did it prove to be a disaster, but there was zero solidarity from the international community. Z-E-R-O. No support for the Great March of Return, which also was a disappointment to them.
Q & A
One term that came up several times is “solidarity.” Where does the strategy of solidarity for the Left come from and what does it mean? What would it mean to be in solidarity with the struggle of the Palestinians? Will socialism be furthered through the politics of solidarity? What does the Left internationally or in the U.S. need in order for something like socialism, revolution, or politics to be possible? Dan seems to be saying that you can have a ceasefire in the reconstruction of Gaza, but who would end up getting the better end of that? Wouldn’t it just be the national bourgeoisie? Wouldn’t it be a more or less Right-wing party, whether that be Hamas or another political organization that could come about in the future? So I wanted to ask kind of in a broad way, why should the Left be in solidarity? What does a politics of solidarity mean?
DL: First of all, let me just get one thing out of the way. The 1988 charter makes clear that Hamas calls for a general Islamic uprising as a solution to the problem. I’m not clairvoyant. I simply know how to read a document. And the document is explicit.
NF: That was 1988.
DL: Number two: Hamas leaders, such as Ghazi Hamad, have made statements to this effect after the October 7 uprising. There really is no mystery as to what Hamas’s strategy was. Regarding the question of tarring them with a broad brush, Hamas is an Islamist Right-wing organization. The Muslim Brotherhood attempted to assassinate Nasser. They have been involved in attacks on communists throughout the Middle East. They sided with the U.S., Saudis, Britain, and France in the civil war in Syria, which was an attempt to overthrow the Assad government. They have played a pernicious, pro-imperialist role throughout their history. So there’s not a question of tarring with a broad brush. It’s simply a question of facing facts as to the true political nature of Hamas.
In response to the question of solidarity: socialism is all about equality; it’s about freedom, national freedom, the removal of the imperialist yoke, the ability of Palestinians and all other colonial or neo-colonial people to take their place in the international socialist community as equals. That is why socialists fight to defend the Palestinian people against this horrendous onslaught. The only way to do that is via a socialist movement, an international working-class movement. Simply making an Islamist revolt will only lead to catastrophe, as is being born out on a daily basis in Gaza. By the way, this is not an attempt to put the blame on Hamas, because Hamas is the weaker of the two parties. Israel is the stronger, and therefore Israel deserves the lion’s share of the blame. But we’re seeing a mutual spiral downward, and the ideological convergence, as I said before, is striking. We need to have a working-class, anti-imperialist, socialist movement which fights for the equality and the possibility of democratic socialist development for all people in the Middle East, including the Jews in Israel, the Palestinians, and all other minorities in the Arab world who, by the way, in the Muslim world, are fiercely oppressed.
How are we supposed to understand the fact that Kahanism[16] and the far Right in Israel in general tends to be a kind of lower-class phenomenon? Relatively Left-wing alignment is associated with the Ashkenazi who tend to be better off in society. The base of Likud[17] and of the further Right parties are overwhelmingly Mizrahi people who are economically marginalized in the country. I don’t see how abstract promises of economic liberation would be able to overcome what is offered by the far Right, which is strengthening the identity of people and the opportunity to become powerful. Is that familiar?
DL: Yes, Israel is not that unique. We see this phenomenon all over the world: this shocking reversal where the socialist movement was once based in the proletariat and now the workers, the lower middle class, whatever you want to call them, have gone far to the Right. It seems that only the Right is able to capture their imagination and to speak to their resentments and their growing anger. This is what’s fueling the accelerating Right-wing rush. Israel is no different than the U.S., Germany, Portugal, or even Iran where ultra-Right parties made startling advances in the recent parliamentary elections. Our task is the same across the entire industrial world.
JW: Working-class people have interests that transcend the current cultural or social power that’s offered to them in far-Right movements. If you have a structure to appeal to, you can move with that individual desire for power. If, as you said, the Mizrahim in Israel have a certain affinity for Likud because Likud offers them the opportunity to be on top for once. The Mizrahim in the Arab world were often degraded or second-class citizens. This desire to get ahead in society, which appeals a lot more to lower middle class people for the same reason something like socialism does, gives the promise of a better life. I think about this in America too. People have desires or ways forward that don’t have to be these things; it’s just the available structure on the ground in these places. In Israel, it’s the destruction of the Israeli Labor Party and the Left political space for the Israeli Right. When there’s only political space for that, when you have these desires to advance yourself or have your interests seen, you’re going to fall into those structures. People have the opportunity to make specific selections to help their own lives, and if there’s only infrastructure to help them on a Rightward turn, you see people take a Rightward turn. The point of building solidarity or a Leftist movement is to develop a space where people can move to the Left based on their own interests, and it’ll bring general values of solidarity or brotherhood that would hopefully eliminate these racist, reactionary turns people take in this country and in Israel.
Moderator: Why is this a Left cause? What does the Left have to offer this cause that the Right doesn’t? Brotherhood is clearly something that the Right can provide.
JW: Selectively.
Moderator: Why are you Leftists? Is it simply brotherhood? A better deal?
NF: It’s always been the value of the Left: solidarity with the oppressed, or as Frantz Fanon famously put it, with “the wretched of the Earth.” Obviously Marx, in that tradition, had solidarity with the proletariat, in part, for the obvious reason, that they represented the most — to use the language of that era — alienated portion of our world. They were ones who lacked the basic necessities of life, those who lacked any control over their lives. With the proletariat, they represented a historic force, an organized force, etc., but at bottom it was the wretched of the Earth. If you read the writings of Rosa Luxemburg, she was deeply sympathetic — almost prescient, given the era in which she lived, with the sufferings of people in South America and Africa — and she writes about it with a great deal of humanity. That was part of what it meant to be part of the Left. So when a people was facing a genocide, it would be a normal cause; it would be odd if the Left were indifferent, given its tradition, to the fate of the people of Gaza.
Having said that, there’s always a danger of internalizing too uncritically clichés that float around in the journalism and punditry world. Let’s take a couple phrases. Number one: “the most Right-wing government in Israel’s history.” I’m not sure what that means. Israel’s first government carried out the expulsion of the indigenous population. Now that was, by technical terms, a Left-wing government. We shouldn’t forget that the government in 1948 was socialist and also communist — Mapai[18] and the Mapam[19] were members of the Second International. Parts of that movement were pro-Stalin and pro-USSR. You could be technically on the Left and still part of an ugly history. The two go hand-in-hand. To call this the most Right-wing government — well, it happened to Israel’s most Left-wing government, namely the one in 1948, which created the problem in the first place by carrying out the expulsion of the indigenous population. Many of you are too young to remember — in fact, all of you, except possibly Dan — the biggest bloodletting before the current one, and how I got started in this cause in the first place, was in 1982 with the invasion of Lebanon. The estimates are that about 15–20 thousand people were killed. It was the largest number by far until the current disaster. That was a Labor-Likud government. The Labor government supported the invasion of Lebanon. To characterize this as the most Right-wing government — domestically that’s true in terms of all sorts of legislation to roll back the liberal era. But in terms of foreign policy, the Israeli government today is not particularly Right-wing. There’s no dissent whatsoever. If you look at the polling data, 90% of Israeli society believes Israel is either using enough force or not enough force in Gaza. Only 10% believe they’re using too much force. So to talk about it in isolation as the Right-wing government — no. It’s the whole society. Israel has a Right, a far Right, and an ultra-Right. There is no Center and there is no Left.
Not to beat a dead horse, but the biggest propaganda victory for Israel is that since October 7, we’re told it’s an Israel–Hamas war. It’s not an Israel–Hamas war. Remember, Eiland described Gaza as a huge concentration camp in 2004, before Hamas came into power. Already in 1990, Israel was imposing the closure on Gaza, which culminated in the blockade. The problem hasn’t been Hamas; the problem has been the people of Gaza, and I’m not going to mythologize them, but the people of Gaza have refused to acquiesce to their fate. That’s why initially, right after October 7, they weren’t talking about Hamas. They were talking about the people of Gaza. “We’re going to finally settle accounts with the people of Gaza.” It’s not an Israel–Hamas war; it’s an Israel–Gaza war.
Norm, you seemed to imply that it was an open question that humanity would even remember this, implying that perhaps we were facing mass extinction. How do these current conflicts point to that, and what can be done to avoid it? Daniel used this pithy term of a “hundred years’ war,” that there’s been this continuity, since maybe 1914 to the present, of global capitalism brought on by militarization. Is it pessimistic to consider the immediate and long-term demands of the Left to be ineffectual in the face of the conflict?
DL: I don’t mean to say the Left is ineffectual. Huge battles lie ahead. The Left has been thrown onto the defensive. It has retreated. The forces are against it. The class forces are favoring the far-Right at this moment, but the only hope lies in the Left, which can eventually prevail. I don’t want to minimize the struggle. We’re entering into an era of growing war. We have Emmanuel Macron talking about sending French troops into Ukraine. It looks like Ukraine is beginning to collapse, and the idea of a Russian victory in Ukraine is throwing Europe into a panic. For the war in Gaza, I don’t see any resolution. It’s just going to get uglier and uglier. There’s a good chance that Trump will be elected, and Trump, if anything, is absolutely pro-Israel, but is probably even friendly to the Kahanist wing of the Netanyahu government. We’re facing a period of widening waves of warfare. I haven’t even mentioned global warming or the economy. But essentially it is good that the world is an ever-tighter unit. Essentially, the proletariat that is engaged in capitalist production has tripled or quadrupled since the 1980s. There is the basis for international proletarian solidarity that’s being laid, which will eclipse any previous period. There is potential for a global socialist movement to launch a counter-offensive against this completely suicidal, nihilistic, far-Right capitalist drive.
Moderator: Dan, today we have an anti-war movement, and it seems totally ineffectual. If we’re not just going to continue with the same trajectory of the last 100 years, does the Left have anything at all to offer?
NF: I don’t see any point in throwing cold water on people’s efforts. The anti-war movement in the U.S. began in 1964. There wasn’t the first mass demonstration in the U.S. until 1967. It took a long time. The demonstrations against the 2003 Gulf War were the biggest demonstrations in world history. And yes, the war happened, but you can’t expect it. It’s just an obvious fact. You’re up against an organized, powerful, and concentrated ruling elite. It’s a tough battle. But we shouldn’t poo-poo efforts that are being made. I don’t think it’s true to say that we haven’t had any impact. I was in a debate the other day with Israel’s chief historian, Benny Morris. He said, “if Israel wanted to, it could have killed 500,000 people” — meaning the army — and I said, “no, you can’t kill 500,000 people because there are constraints in the real world.” The constraints are the ones we create. There are mass demonstrations. There are mass protests. It’s not going to be much of a solace to you, but they actually do impose restraints. You know, like when the Israeli minister said, “why don’t we just nuke Gaza?” Because they can’t. Do they want to? Of course they want to. But they can’t because there are constraints in the real world. And one of the constraints is the massive outpouring of support for the people of Gaza. Now, did it save 10 lives? 100 lives? 1,000 lives? I can’t tell you that. That’s impossible to quantify. But we shouldn’t be so dismissive of all those heroic efforts. Each time there is a demonstration in Grand Central Station or at the Statue of Liberty, they do something. There’s been a fantastic change in public opinion. I mean, I go back to a day when having 20 people there was considered a big demonstration. That’s how movements are built. If you want something overnight, it’s not going to happen. But on the other hand, it’s been extremely impressive what’s happened. Even though I’ll admit it’s impossible to quantify how many lives are saved. I’m not prepared to dismiss what's happened. It’s been deeply moving and inspiring to watch it unfold. To see all of Grand Central Station filled with Jews opposing the war or the extermination — that was spectacular.
How do you explain this peculiar conflict? It seems to be more than just a socialist issue. It’s like an ethno-nationalist project.
NF: There isn’t an easy answer to that question. It would be foolish to deny that the capitalist system is implicated in what’s happening. Now, exactly how do you want me to connect that broad generalization with the state of Israel? Am I going to just say, “it’s all about oil,” or something like that? No. It’s not all about oil or gas. Going from generalizations to the specifics, it’s not easy to figure out. On the other hand, it’s correct to say that there is a connection between the local and specific aspects and the system as a whole.
DL: It really is about oil. Of course, any singular answer is inadequate. But you have to recognize that since 1980, the U.S. has made control of the Middle East oil-energy resources, especially in and around the Persian Gulf, its top foreign-policy priority. That was the Carter Doctrine that was enunciated in January 1980, written by Zbigniew Brzeziński, Carter’s National Security Advisor. The U.S. is not going to give up its military alliance with the preeminent military power in the region. The U.S. has adopted a policy that whatever Israel does, the U.S. will hem and haw, but in the end, it will always side with Israel. Joe Biden is completely in line with 40–50 years of U.S. foreign policy, which is just consistent support for Israel, apologetics on Israel’s behalf, engaging in endless, ridiculous, diplomatic maneuvers around this farcical two-state solution, etc.
But, oil is really at the basis of this whole thing. Oil is the fuel that drives modern capitalism. It has driven it since the first Model T came off the assembly line in 1908. The centrality of the energy question cannot be exaggerated. The U.S. sees the Persian Gulf as essentially the way of controlling the entire global economy, which is why it is determined to see that no one else gets its hands on the prize. That explains a great deal of this conflict.
EP: On the topic of oil, we’re in a weird time where fossil fuels are slowly and painfully being phased out. We don’t really need them. But just last year at the G20 summit, India, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and the U.S. all made a deal to create a new railway, part of the peace and prosperity operation, specifically for transport of clean energy and natural gas. The question of oil will be here for a while, and I agree: it’s a huge reason for the U.S.’s reliance on Israel. Israel also has incredible military intelligence. The Israel Aerospace Industries is a good missile manufacturer, and the Mossad has good surveillance tech. Our data is wrapped into one and we share a lot of information with one another. To decide to take a firmer stance with Israel would mean that we might piss them off, and that’s dangerous when half of your military intelligence is in the hands of another country with great surveillance technology. But as we move into renewables, I have no idea. The question for some North African countries like Libya and Sudan is what to do when you see Israel and France giving the Rapid Support Forces anti-terrorism surveillance technology to corrupt police forces. Israel and the U.S. are tied up in these things. As we’re moving towards renewables, what is the new gold going to be? Is it the question of a cold war with AI and high-tech weapons? A lot of American and Israeli unmanned aerial vehicles often end up in the hands of Iranian militants.
Dan, given your resistance to Norm’s slave-revolt analogy, do you think that the characterization of the conflict as being between two far-Right parties captures both the ways that Israel has actively suffered loss as well as the history of Palestinian organization?
DL: It’s complicated. I didn’t reject the slave-revolt analogy; it has its advantages and its disadvantages. There are decades of bottled-up rage, these people have been held prisoner, and Israel has never succeeded in subduing Gaza. That is the remarkable thing. Gaza has been a center of ceaseless revolt since 1948. All Israeli attempts to pacify it have completely failed. Norman is absolutely right: this is commendable. The people of Gaza don’t want to accept their fate. They don’t want to be locked in this prison. They want their freedom. They want their equality. These are all aspirations that we should support. There’s no doubt that Israel is an expansionist state, that the Palestinians have been on the losing end, and that we have to back their struggle. But at the same time, there’s politics. Politics involves parties and political formations. I do think that the Israeli government is the most Right-wing in history. It’s being challenged from the fascist Right, which is making inroads and progress. If they do gain power, the catastrophe will become even deeper and more intense. We have to support the Palestinian liberation struggle, but we’ve got to emphasize that it can only be achieved through the mobilization of the international proletariat.
Joe, In your opening remarks, you said that part of what was interesting to you about participating in this discourse is that there’s an age split. You said there is an opportunity for the Left. How do you deal with that and the fact that this age group that you’re talking about — 30 and under — is also the most disenfranchised by American politics and the least willing or excited to create change through classic political systems? They feel like they’re unable to make change through electoral and judicial systems.
JW: As said earlier, every crisis is an opportunity. For under-30s, myself included, I’m sure many feel like the political system is completely removed. The traditional “show up and vote in the primary system,” has removed us from the process. Young people’s coalescence around Bernie Sanders in 2016 and 2020 would have been an opportune time for them to step more into a role, but the failure of those campaigns reflects the Democratic Party’s unwillingness to lean on the youth. Disaffection is part of why you see such a broad spread of young people doing labor organizing, Palestine organizing, or engaging in these political spheres to create new structures or getting into older structures like labor unions, where they can act more decisively as a bloc of younger people and turn that disenfranchisement into a source of struggle. I would love to see that continue to happen. I know how my peers feel and try to convert that into some actual political program, a part of which is voting or engaging in some kind of class-struggle elections.
DL: And yet Bernie Sanders has been absolutely horrible in this episode. So where does that leave DSA?
JW: I understand. For an organization of thousands of people, many of whom outflank Bernie on this issue, the fact that it coalesced around his candidacy was not outright support of everything the man says or does, especially after the election. Particularly on this issue, I knew going into my support for him that he did not necessarily share my values; I knew it would be a sea change for him. In his 20s, Sanders had an older labor-Zionist, socialist-Zionist view of the conflict that muddles his view. That’s not reflective of the young people so much as Bernie planning on supporting Joe Biden in November.
DL: Is DSA going to support Joe Biden in November?
JW: I don’t speak for the 70,000-member organization.
DL: What do you think? You know more than anyone else here.
JW: DSA will do what they did in 2020, which is to say, “we need to defeat Trump,” which people took as a coded reason to support Biden, especially in swing states. There isn’t necessarily something wrong with that response, but I won’t support Biden myself.
DL: But that just means more weapons for Israel, if Biden’s elected.
Joe Whitcomb: I understand that; it also means that with the other outcome. If you’re participating in voting, there’s a singular focus, especially because of how America functions in voting. What’s so disenfranchising is that every two or four years, you get the chance to write your name for a little D or a little R, and that functions as your political identity. There is a short-sighted understanding of why people vote in attacking people who say, “X thing might be better within a large host of things that will not be,” when they write their name for X or Y, and not having it be the entirety of their political identity.
Dan, you gave a more pessimistic read of the situation in Gaza, that it’s a death spiral. But in your response, your political prognosis was radically optimistic. The solution is international proletarian revolution. Norm, you gave an apparently more optimistic prognosis of the immediate question. Our movements do something; it’s meaningful to go out and protest. But your vision of the goal of the Left, its historical past, was extremely pessimistic: we succeed if there are a thousand fewer deaths. That’s the goal. How do the younger panelists relate to these two views? Is that your view of solidarity? Is that your view of the goal of the Left? Is the goal of the Left to be a drag on the horrors of the world, to humanize them, to slow them down? Or is it something else? What is the role of the Left in adopting those practices?
EP: What Israel is doing and has been doing for over a hundred years is acting as one of the darkest empires that we’ve seen, and there’ve been a few.
Going off of Norm, who said that it might be difficult to track capitalism’s connections, it isn’t that hard to grasp. You have capitalists who are funding political action committees which create our policy towards Israel, which sends weapons to Israel, which destroys livelihoods and has done so for years. You have people paying tens of thousands of dollars to cross the Rafah border. And then you have African and Arab Israelis who are being oppressed in Israel, just as other lower-class Israelis, who are ultra-orthodox, are being pipelined into politics. The U.S. sustains the whole process. This is all connected to the Left in different ways. Standing with Palestine isn’t just standing — it’s also listening to Palestinians and trying to undo years of selective education. You see what can happen to a group of people in just a hundred years: this has created a scary and dangerously racist army. We see polarizations in the U.S. like that all the time. In a way, it’s trying to come back to our humanity, and the most basic instincts of that humanity – at least that’s what it is for me when I brought up my friend. Her and I have lived completely different lives. I can’t empathize with her on half the things that we talk about, but somehow we’re best friends, both artists, and we give each other the best advice. I don’t know if you need a bigger reason than just wanting to help another human being.
JW: In the context of a death spiral, from a Leftist perspective, I wouldn’t necessarily agree. The future is not foretold. You brought up Nat Turner’s slave revolt. Who would have predicted in 1831 that 30 years later the federal government would be leading an army that included 100,000 escaped or former slaves in a revolt to crush slavery? Who could have foreseen that for something like slavery that seemed so ingrained into American society? The important fact that we live with is that conditions are going to be difficult; they’re going to look hopeless. The role of the Left or the role of solidarity is to continue building structures that allow people to fight back against these things. In the case of the Civil War, it was eventually a Republican Party that could capture the presidency. You could see a NATO army marching into Israel in 30 years. I don’t know if that’s an accurate analogy.
DL: Joe raised a good point. Harriet Beecher Stowe published Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1852, and she gives no indication whatsoever in the book of what’s going to happen a scant nine years later. She can’t imagine it. The only thing she can imagine is the recolonization, the ethnic cleansing of black people. She had no foreshadowing at all. Things can change — you’re absolutely correct. The questioner is correct: I am pessimistic for the short term, but optimistic for the long term. The other capitalism is at a complete dead end. It’s plunging the world into catastrophe and on every level; we’re faced with a perfect storm of capitalist distress. The only solution to that is international socialism. The American system of government is crumbling before our eyes. It’s a severe crisis. I’ve written several books on this topic. I think Trump will be elected in November, but the political conditions in the U.S. are changing dramatically and this is the key to where the battles are going to go. In the 1960s, we all adhered to General Mao’s theories that it was the colonial world where the revolutionary impulse would be. 60 years later, the battle is being concentrated in the U.S., which holds the key to the global future.
NF: I brought up — and then the baton was taken by others — the Nat Turner revolt. John Brown, when he was asked what inspired him, said it was Nat Turner. In Frederick Douglass’s brilliant oratory on John Brown, he says that there’s a direct line from John Brown to the Civil War. Which means, to use another cliche, we’re all links in a chain. In 1860, Frederick Douglass gave up. He said, “we did everything we could” — meaning for the abolitionists, moral suasion — and he said it didn’t work. Then along came the Civil War. These are unpredictable events. We never know how what we do may or may not contribute to a positive outcome. The lesson from there is one thing we can say for sure: if we do nothing, there will be no positive outcome. We have to figure out the most effective way, and maybe we need creative new ways. But in my moments of darkest despair, when I go to a demonstration and I see the kinds of commitment, conviction, and as I said, the fact that these young people keep coming out, that’s reason for hope. Acknowledging that maybe nothing will come of it or nothing big will come of it, but there’s always the possibility that something will come of it. For a lot of young people — the 25-year-olds — the reason there’s so much outpouring for Gaza is because Gaza has become a metaphor for a merciless, heartless system that grinds people down. In 1968, there was a famous German dissenter named Rudi Dutschke. There was a slogan: “we are all Rudi Dutschke.” And for the 25-year-olds, it’s “we are all Gaza.” Obviously, you’re not suffering from a genocide, but there’s that feeling of complete hopelessness, helplessness in the face of this colossal juggernaut that’s grinding young people down here, and grinding them down in the most literal sense in Gaza. That’s why young people keep coming out. |P
Transcribed by D. L. Jacobs
[1] Video of the panel is available at <https://youtu.be/4r3Ye10EyOE>.
[2] Chega, whose name is Portuguese for “enough,” was founded in 2019 by André Ventura, a former member of the Social Democratic Party (Partido Social Democrata).
[3] Hamas, “The Covenant of the Islamic Resistance Movement” (August 18, 1988), <https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/hamas.asp>.
[4] Hamas, “A Document of General Principles & Policies” (2017), <https://irp.fas.org/world/para/docs/hamas-2017.pdf>.
[5] V. I. Lenin, “Draft Theses on National and Colonial Questions for the Second Congress of the Communists International,” in Lenin Selected Works, vol. 31, second ed. (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1965), 144–51, <https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/jun/05.htm>.
[6] Also known as the First Gaza War, it was a three-week armed conflict between Gaza Strip Palestinian paramilitary groups and the Israel Defense Forces, from December 2008 to January 2009.
[7] [Hebrew] Plural of kibbutz, a gathering, a community, etc.
[8] See Nayera Abdallah, Nadine Awadalla, and Mohamed Wali, “Egypt’s Sisi rejects transfer of Gazans, discusses aid with Biden,” Reuters, October 18, 2023, <https://www.reuters.com/world/egypt-rejects-any-displacement-palestinians-into-sinai-says-sisi-2023-10-18/>.
[9] See Paul Nuki and Lilia Sebouai, “Q&A: Will Israel be charged with genocide at The Hague?,” The Telegraph, January 10, 2024, <https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/terror-and-security/gaza-genocide-international-court-of-justice-the-hague/>.
[10] [Biblical Hebrew] The enemy nation of the Israelites.
[11] The American Israel Public Affairs Committee.
[12] Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (against Israel).
[13] The PFLP was founded in 1967 by George Habash.
[14] Fatah, formerly known as the Palestinian National Liberation Movement, was founded in 1959.
[15] [Arabic] A term used to describe military groups that are willing to sacrifice themselves.
[16] A religious Zionist ideology based on the views of Rabbi Meir Hahane, the founder of the Jewish Defense League and the Kach Party.
[17] Likud – National Liberal Movement is a political party in Israel, the chairperson of which is Benjamin Netanyahu.
[18] Mapai (an acronym for Mifleget Poalei Eretz Yisrael (Workers’ Party of the Land of Israel)), was a political party in Israel. It was founded in 1930 and it dissolved in 1968 when it merged with the Israeli Labor Party.
[19] Mapam was a political party in Israel. It was founded in 1948 and dissolved in 1997.
