A Non-Ideological Thinking

11-19-2023

Roger Berkowitz

In a speech at The Federalist Society last week, Bari Weiss points out the many similarities between what happened in Israel on October 7, and what happened in New York City and Washington DC. on September 11, 2001. 
 

The difference between 10/7 and 9/11, Weiss argues, is found in the wildly different reactions. After 9/11 there were isolated moments of celebration by those who cheered an anti-imperialist attack on the United States, the overwhelming response was horror and an intolerance of those who sought to contextualize or excuse terror by al-Qeada. After 10/7, however, there was a shocking willingness to excuse and justify the terror attacks, to identify terror with a struggle for liberation, and to glorify those who paraglided into Israel to kill civilians, behead babies, and rape women. A number of groups in the United States embraced the paraglider as a symbol of freedom. And slogans such as “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” “Glory to our Martyrs,” and “globalize the Intifada” rang out across college campuses and at protests around the world.  

What, Weiss asks, can explain the different reactions 22 years apart? One answer, the easy answer, is that the victims of the October 7th attack were Jews and that antisemitism is the world’s oldest and most powerful form of hatred. But antisemitism is not itself the cause of such general anger and the justification that praises barbaric acts as liberatory. There is, of course, a form of Jew-hatred aimed at specific Jews. The terrorists in Hamas who butchered Israelis and called their parents to boast about it were likely driven in large part by such a visceral hatred of Jews. But the western decolonial activists chanting slogans calling for the eradication of Israel–some of them Jews themselves—are not antisemitic in that sense. 

As Hannah Arendt argues in The Origins of Totalitarianism, antisemitism as an ideology is not the same as Jew hatred. Rather, it is a political weapon brandished by different groups to suit their own political interests. Most people who deploy antisemitism as a weapon either don’t know any Jews or have nothing against individual Jews. They use antisemitism to attack institutions associated with Jews in the popular imagination (elites, banks, Hollywood, universities, and governments). If Jews are the cause of misery, the embodiment of governmental and financial and cultural and academic power, attacking Jews is a way of undermining institutional authority and power. It is this way that antisemitism was deployed by the pan-German and pan-Slavic movements in late 19th century Europe to undermine the authority of various nation-states. Attacking Jews was a way of attacking state power and calling for pseudo-mystical ethnic power that would cross state boundaries and spur movements based on coherent ideological ideals.  

Similarly, antisemitism today is a weapon turned upon any and all establishment institutions that are seen to be either dominated by or protective of Jews. Jews have come to be synonymous with power, playing on the old forgery of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. In this way, antisemitism is, as Weiss argues, a symptom. She writes:
 Weiss is right to see that the outbreaks of antisemitism we witness today are symptoms of a general breakdown in authority. In an ideological universe where Jews are imagined to be representatives of the powerful who oppress victims represented by the Palestinians, these same Jews stand-in for all powerful institutions and all examples of injustice in the world. Such an ideology has no use for facts or history in which Jews are victims or Palestinians violent attackers. Like all ideologies, antisemitism offers a single key to the horrors of the world, simplifying reality into black and white, Jew or non-Jew. In this way, antisemitism is one exemplary realization of the overarching modern ideology that elevates all that is indigenous or innocent and condemns whatever is settled and guilty.  As Weiss writes of this new ideology:
 
It is true that most students chanting such slogans are well meaning, idealistic, and simply deeply upset by the images of seemingly wanton destruction of Gaza City and the killing of over 10,000 Palestinian civilians including 4,000 children. The politics of movements on college campuses are complex. Many people who show up for mass rallies have little actual knowledge of middle east politics, the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, or even definitions of genocide.  Some, likely many, are not aware that hundreds of thousands of civilians are being killed in Syria, the Democratic Congo, Yemen, and other regions, dwarfing the number of Palestinians killed in Gaza. And on one level, it is simply a sign of a live moral compass to be repulsed by the images of destruction in Gaza. That we don't have images from Syria, Congo, Yemen, China and other countries where mass murders are taking place is a question that needs to be addressed beyond the emotions of large scale protests. Most of these protesters—as is true by nearly all protest movements—are drawn not by all sorts of personal and moral and political forces. The slogans rhyme. They announce that one is on the right team and make one feel righteous in one’s performance of outrage. And that is how it should be. If young people aren’t outraged at something in the world, there is something wrong with them. There is plenty to be outraged by in the actions of the Israeli government, both in the present bombing of Gaza and in the way the occupation of the West Bank and the control of Gaza have been carried out since 1967. There is also plenty to be outraged about in the actions of Hamas. What is sad is that so many students, for reasons that have little to do with facts and much to do with being on the right side of an ideological divide, are willing to celebrate death and destruction on one side as liberation while they prosecute death and destruction on the other side with wildly inaccurate slogans like genocide. Most of these students are acting out of good motives and they should be engaged and supported, not attacked. I hope they will come to realize that their youthful outrage was misplaced and simplistic. But that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t have a the courage and moral sense to make their voices heard. 

The real shame is not the student protests, but the rage of the so-called intellectuals, those who either do not know the facts they should or simply ignore the facts in order to tell a coherent story that gives meaning to their rage. In this story, the world is divided into colonizers and colonized, powerful and powerless. The powerful are white, male, and Jewish. The powerless are BIPOC, female, and indigenous. Antisemitism has little to do with Jews or hatred of Jews. It is a mix of justifications and conspiracies that authorize ideological certainties. 

Weiss is convinced that these intellectuals and the ideology they wield constitutes a growing threat to the world of common sense facts. I see evidence for her concern. And yet, I do worry as well that framing this as a culture war as Weiss does overstates the threat and risks mobilizing a counter-ideology that reaffirms and restates stale prejudices. She writes:
  
We should look at our friends and our allies. And we should be clear-sighted about those who are our enemies. But our allies are complicated, as are also many who may at times seem to be our enemies. Yes, someone who burns children alive commits an evil act and should be punished and killed for doing so. But few people are pure evil. Maybe no one is. Acts are evil, people rarely are. That is a lesson Hannah Arendt taught us. Most evil is done by people who are thoughtless, shallow, and banal. It is still evil what they do and they need to be held responsible for their actions. But we also must seek to understand them.
It is wrong to excuse the acts of the Hamas fighters who butchered, burned, and beheaded Israelis. But it is also wrong not to seek to understand the pain and agony of Palestinian life that made possible such evil acts. 

If we are in a culture war, it is not a war between good and evil. It is rather a struggle for humanity, for a common world in which we can disagree and yet respect each other. A world in which we have prejudices since no human can live without prejudgments, but one in which we are open to questioning our prejudices. In this struggle for humanity, what we most need is the kind of enlarged way of thinking from the perspectives of others that Arendt, following Kant, saw to be the basic impulse of thinking. Thinking is the very opposite of ideological reasoning because it maintains always an openness to considering, understanding and learning from others, even from our enemies.