Comrade West Bank settler? A critique of Benjamin Studebaker

Fakhry Al-Serdawi

Platypus Review 172 | December 2024 – January 2025

I HAD THE PLEASURE of actually seeing Benjamin Studebaker during an online Platypus panel on the Middle East on July 20.^[1] Through our comradely deliberations I discovered we had a lot in common; we both see the kernel of truth in Bismarckianism; Marxists should have no empathy nor patience for city-states’ right to self-determination. From that angle, I can understand his opposition to both Israeli and Palestinian nationalisms, and maybe even towards most postcolonial nationalisms in the region.

Studebaker precisely rejects ethno-nationalist city-states. In his article about the Left and the Gaza War,^[2] he absolutely opposes the forcible transfer of Palestinians to neighboring countries, mainly the transfer of Gazans to Egypt. This unradical position seems so radical because it comes in an intellectual context that sets the bar so high when it comes to avoiding anti-Adornian “Resignation”^[3] while talking about Israel-Palestine. On the other hand, what is unique and odd in his opposition to ethno-nationalism is his rejection not of the Israeli settler enterprise in the West Bank but of the dismantlement of the enterprise under International Law, considering that this is where Westerners give Palestinians hope for the ethnic cleansing of the settlers in the West Bank.^[4]

Ethnic cleansing is a term originating from the Yugoslavian War, describing the demographic practice of forcibly removing one or more ethnicities from a certain geographic area (mainly through the use of state and non-state armed violence) in favor of one ethnicity that already lives in that zone, is about to move into that zone, or about to increase its numbers in that zone. Ethnic cleansing is not recognized and categorized independently as a crime under International Law,^[5] yet, it can be the motive for other categories of crimes such as genocide or forcible transfer. Under the Statute of the International Criminal Court, deportation and transfer of the civilian population is considered to be a crime against humanity if the perpetrating force committed this act “without grounds permitted under international law” against a person or persons that were “lawfully present in the area.”^[6]

On July 19, a day before I was on the panel with Studebaker, the International Court of Justice issued an advisory opinion on the legality of the Israeli military, state, and settler presence in the West Bank.^[7] It can be concluded through the direct and clear interpretation of the opinion that the evacuation of the settlers is not unlawful, because the entire settlement enterprise is not legally present in the area, this is because Article 49 in the Fourth Geneva Convention strictly prohibits the transfer of the occupying power’s own civilian population to the occupied territory,^[8] something that Israel has been doing in the last five decades.

One can say, as Studebaker would, that even if the juridical element is not there, the evacuation of the settlers (including women and children) is to be considered factually and morally as ethnic cleansing. The problem with Studebaker equating the immorality of displacing the Gazans to Egypt with the immorality of evacuating the settlers from the West Bank to Israel is not only that it mystifies power and violence relations, but it also avoids talking about the moral and legal costs of not dismantling the settlements.

At the Platypus panel, Studebaker said that,

When you bomb someone to the Stone Age you produce cavemen. We are barbarizing people by bombing them. . . . [But] we can’t hold it against people that they have been barbarized. At the same time, we can’t just do what barbarized subjects want to do; we can’t just acquiesce to whatever the barbarized demand and we can’t ourselves become barbarized . . . We have to protect ourselves from barbarization from the forces that barbarize and from the people who’ve been barbarized.^[9]

Following such logic, we are then allowing ourselves to be barbarized every day by the West Bank settlers as the possible victims of peace, and as the actual existing victims of barbarization by their bureaucratic state (both in the sense of 1950s conservative suburbia barbarization and the Kautsky-condemned, 19th-century barbarization by colonial scramble). The West Bank settlers, whose “ethnic cleansing” Studebaker rejects, do not exist in a vacuum but in a comprehensive regime based upon the illegal confiscation of land and private property, exploitation of natural resources, a totalitarian system of movement-impeding checkpoints and surveillance that makes COVID lockdowns in the West look like a joke, military and settler armed violence, internal forced displacement of Palestinians (ethnic cleansing!), the creation of city-sized, permanent separate racial enclaves under an apartheid arrangement.

Yet, Studebaker did not establish by himself this mystification and trivialization of the situation in the occupied territory (nor did he wish to make a normative argument that results in such trivialization). This was already embedded in the political culture of both American Zionists and much of the new wave of pro-Palestine Americans, a political culture that has been conflating online cultural disasters since 2016 with offline real wars with real consequences around the world (Studebaker himself, eloquently talks about the Western meme-ification of the Ukraine War). The decade-long woke-ification of the Palestinian question, which continued after October 7, so upper-middle-class Leftists can continue to equalize their victim status to that of people in the Third World, has resulted in convincing the rest of the American political spectrum to treat ceasefire (a.k.a., stopping the slaughter) as a non-urgent, online meme.

At the Platypus panel, Djene Bajalan said that the mainstream Left is trying to impose its local American understanding of racism onto the Middle East. This means that for Leftist ideology, America, Canada, and Australia are as bad as Israel because they are settler-colonial societies where the figure of the “settler” and the condition of “whiteness” are irredeemable. On the other hand, Western Zionists perceive Israel to be as good as America, Canada, and Australia, a success story of a de facto member of the Commonwealth. One can showcase this position in the Australian official intervention in the 2001 Durban International Conference against Racism. The Australian delegation argued that the colonial constitutional, legal, and institutional legacy in Australia cannot be watered down to and demonized as a crime of colonialism.^[10] Yet, the Australians wanted to have their cake and eat it too, as they argued that the Israeli “democracy” is also not to be criticized.

Under this culture-war spin-off, Zionists and the new wave of pro-Palestine activists meet at the very ends of the horseshoe, Israel is America, Canada, and Australia. Either everything is colonized, even in books, curriculum, medicine, and diet (as Geoff Shullenberger has pointed out),^[11] or nothing is colonized even in the West Bank where the Israeli settlers happen to “migrate” to an “abstract” space.

This confusion in the relationship between settler and local causes another confusion, which is between the concrete and the universal. In his above-mentioned article, Studebaker argues that the Left’s position on Palestine is necessarily ethno-nationalistic, claiming that it would always be a validation of an “ethnonationalist ontology.”^[12] Based on what I have already described on the anti-colonial turn in the American Left, I only agree with him when it comes to describing some groups on the Left. The historical internationalist and legal struggle to find a solution to the Palestinian question is not ethno-nationalistic, but a response to the plight of ethno-nationalism. Even the two-state solution was a way forward beyond ethno-nationalism, and a concession from both sides to international liberalism; a solution moderated under significant international presence to demilitarize both Israeli and Palestinian societies. The generalization that Studebaker makes over the many-layered waves of pro-Palestine activism glosses over these complexities. Even Hamas itself cannot be understood under the framework of ethno-nationalism because of its Islamic cosmopolitan (and authoritarian) ideology, which is hostile to all provincialist nationalisms, even to Palestinian nationalism itself.

The mystification of the ethno-nationalist nature of Israel once again goes back to its equation to post-settler-colonial societies in Western democracies. In this context, the likes of Bill Maher and Douglas Murray make humanist universality only synonymous with the geography of the West in its Huntingtonian^[13] militarized form. This is where Israel becomes a Western state, with its right to make “tough decisions” and to inflict its own Dresden and Hiroshima bombings, just like the West always had. (Ironically, Tablet magazine Netanyahuists defend the current Israeli government as a nativist project opposing the decadence of the West.)^[14]

Western metaphysical Eurocentrism cannot be fought with metaphysical anti-colonialism or Third Worldism, as the Left has been doing after 1968 and 2016. On the contrary, the metaphysical Eurocentrism that allows the West to be militarized and anti-universal (while claiming to be) can only be fought through constitutional Eurocentrism. This is where Dave Smith, as a prominent contemporary example, provides a deconstruction of both Zionist and anti-colonial Leftist discourse on the Middle East when he says that the justifications of Israeli state power, under the current conditions, are “ un-American.”^[15] Smith is a stark example of what Edward Said described when he talked about how American constitutional libertarianism can be a basis upon which one could have solid historical material and a universal humanist discourse on Palestinian liberation.^[16]

This gets us to the final mystification in American political culture that influences Studebaker’s discourse on the Middle East, which is the myth (and the bipartisan arrangement) that only the radical Left gets to have exclusive ownership of Palestinian liberation. Studebaker’s final verdict in his article is that the Left is incapable of producing a radical change in the U.S. Middle East policy. He says that: “The American left is not in position to help the Gazans, and it is not in position to help the Gazans precisely because of the litany of strategic mistakes it has made over the past decade,” particularly when the Left “wrote the Biden administration a blank check [in 2020],” accepting “the Democratic Party’s narrative that the right poses an existential threat to the system has made it impossible for the left to offer credible opposition to the Biden administration.”^[17]

Maybe Studebaker is correct about the Left, but a change of policy is possible alongside the political Center, the anti-establishment Right, international legalism, and the historical, more nuanced, waves of pro-Palestine activism (which do not follow the short-term performative strategies of the Left). And even if Tablet magazine Netanyahuists repeat the trope that ending military aid to Israel will not change anything and might even make things better for Israel, this pseudo-populist argument fails to recall the history of international sanctions against Apartheid South Africa and the future of international sanctions against Israel, a country that is certainly not Russia in size, population, economy, and Afro-Asian relations.

Without true international pressure, ethno-nationalism will never end in the Israeli–Palestinian context. Nonetheless, because Benjamin Studebaker is not state-phobic, and because he comes from a political tradition that equates Israel with America, Canada, and Australia, he might have faith in the ability of the Israeli state to achieve equality and maybe even comradeship between Israeli and Palestinian in general and between settler and local in particular. But the forever war that Israel is conducting in the occupied territory, which is based upon deep connections between its military-industrial complex and settler-industrial complex, leads among other things to a core securitization of the West Bank that is designed for the relationship between settler and local to be a one of “deterrence” that is antithetical to “comradeship.” This nature of the relationship would be the basis of “the next day” scenario, after the war, according to a settler movement that has its eyes on recolonizing Gaza.

This local context mimics the wider regional relationship between Israel and its neighbors. Back in 2019, Bibi Netanyahu celebrated this bleak vision, which has nothing to do with comradery, when he said, “I have already noted that for the foreseeable future, the only kind of peace that will endure in the region between Arab and Arab and between Arab and Jew is the peace of deterrence.”^[18] |P

^[1] Fakhry Al-Serdawi, Djene Bajalan, Eli Sennesh, Benjamin Studebaker, “Left perspectives on the Israel–Palestine conflict” (July 20, 2024), <https://youtu.be/E3brvk76nV4>.

^[2] Benjamin Studebaker, “The Left Cannot Make Use of the Gaza War,” Sublation (April 7, 2024), <https://sublationmedia.com/the-left-cannot-make-use-of-the-gaza-war/>.

^[3] See Theodor W. Adorno, “Resignation” (1969), in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 289–93.

^[4] Studebaker, “The Left Cannot Make Use.”

^[5] See United Nations, Regional Information Centre for Western Europe, “International law: Understanding justice in times of war,” (March 27, 2024), <https://unric.org/en/international-law-understanding-justice-in-times-of-war/>.

^[6] International Criminal Court, “Article 7 (1) (d) Crime against humanity of deportation or forcible transfer of population,” in Elements of Crimes (The Hague: International Criminal Court, 2013), 4, <https://www.icc-cpi.int/publications/core-legal-texts/elements-crimes>.

^[7] International Court of Justice, “Legal consequences arising from the policies and practices of Israel in the occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem” (July 19, 2024), <https://www.icj-cij.org/sites/default/files/case-related/186/186-20240719-adv-01-00-en.pdf>.

^[8] “Article 49 – Deportations, transfers, evacuations,” in Convention (IV) relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War (August 12, 1949), <https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/ihl-treaties/gciv-1949/article-49>.

^[9] Al-Serdawi, Bajalan, Sennesh, Studebaker, “Left perspectives.”

^[10] “Chapter VII. Adoption of the final document and the report of the conference,” in Report of the World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance (August 31 – September 8, 2001), <https://www.un.org/unispal/document/auto-insert-194615/>.

^[11] Geoff Shullenberger, “The Crisis of Therapeutic ‘Decolonization,’” Compact (October 11, 2023), <https://www.compactmag.com/article/the-crisis-of-therapeutic-decolonization/>.

^[12] Studebaker, “The Left Cannot Make Use.”

^[13] After Samuel Huntington.

^[14] See Gadi Taub’s article series Herzl’s Children (January–May 2024), <https://www.tabletmag.com/columns/gadi-taub-herzl-children>.

^[15] Emily Austin, Omar Baddar, Piers Morgan, Dave Smith, “‘Israel Does NOT Want To End This War’ Deadly Gaza Hostage Raid,” Piers Morgan Uncensored (June 10, 2024), <https://youtu.be/2zc8ytzJP5U>.

^[16] See Edward W. Said, “The Palestine Question and the American Context,” Arab Studies Quarterly 2, no. 2 (Spring 1980): 127–49, <https://www.jstor.org/stable/41857536>.

^[17] Studebaker, “The Left Cannot Make Use.”

^[18] Benjamin Netanyahu, “A Plan for Peace,” Tablet (August 26, 2019), <https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/bibis-peace-plan>, from Benjamin Netanyahu, A Durable Peace: Israel and its Place Among the Nations (2000).