Here’s my note from home, explaining my absence from Substack. First, I continue writing the book, every day for three to six hours depending on what else has to get done and what percentage of the things I want to say makes it onto the page (I can get down on paper roughly 20 to 40% of what I hear myself trying to say). I’m 75K words into it over seven chapters, and I finally made the French Connection (Jean Wahl’s pragmatism, etc.) Second, Israel’s war in Gaza has taken up more and more of my time and attention, not least because it has become the front line in the protracted war of position which divides the Left from the Right—and which now seems to be the determining factor in the November election.
Herewith a compilation of my thinking on the issue since early October 2023, when Hamas started the war by striking inside Israel from Gaza with horrific force and effect, killing 1200 individuals and taking over 200 hostage. To be plain: this was a terrorist attack replete with war crimes which required a commensurate military reprisal from the IDF. The questions that have consumed me since take that for granted. These questions, which I have taken up at Facebook and now transfer to this space, include the following.
What response was proportionate, and therefore justifiable, in view of the Geneva Conventions and the rules of military engagement? At what point, if any, has Israel’s war in Gaza violated these standards? What effect has the war had on “domestic” politics (that word is in quotes because as far as the students in the leadership of the anti-Zionist, pro-Palestinian movement are concerned, this is a war conducted by the US, and is, accordingly and necessarily, subject to protest by American citizens as well as advocates of human rights elsewhere)? Where does it lead, ideologically and thus politically, here and abroad? If the two-state solution is now a dead letter, what follows for the interpretation of the slogan that has guided both Hamas and Likud in the 21st century, viz., “From the river to the sea”?
And, of course, what does the pro-Palestinian movement on campus mean for the future of higher education and, more generally, American politics?
My answers follow in more or less chronological order.
[From here on in, these are Facebook posts that I haven’t bothered to gather and make part of my Substack routine. They have “datelines,” in keeping with the chronology since October 7, 2023, and links to the articles, mostly from NYRB, LRB, Boston Review, American Prospect, Jacobin, tending by Spring 2024 toward televised discussion of the encampments at Columbia and elsewhere.]
OCTOBER 29, 2023. Where now do the heavens darken, my Lord? You cannot think that upon opening these close crowded skies will forever erase the shadows of memory, for when they do the flood they bring is borne by rivers of blood that will first drown the children. Then it will be left to the old men who write to remember, and their words will last even unto the end of your days. From NYRB.
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2023/11/23/causes-for-despair-raja-shehadeh/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NYR%2010-29-23%20OGieblyn-Filler-Cohen-Leifer-Shehadeh-Durbin-OBrien&utm_content=NYR%2010-29-23%20OGieblyn-Filler-Cohen-Leifer-Shehadeh-Durbin-OBrien%20CID_6021baeb0945d90802630ac39d49163d&utm_source=Newsletter&utm_term=Raja%20ShehadehCauses%20for%20Despair&fbclid=
NOVEMBER 5, 2023. I have hesitated to post this because it makes me feel even more helpless in watching the deliberate use of state terror in Gaza, as aided and abetted by the US. And because by now we can see what the endgame is, and we know its name: you don't need a two-state solution if there are no people left to constitute a second state. Fintan O’Toole at NYRB on what the absence of an “endgame” in Gaza means.
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2023/12/07/no-endgame-in-gaza-fintan-otoole/?utm_medium=email
NOVEMBER 18, 2023. As I read it, a reply to Peter Beinert, who has argued that BDS will gain ground insofar as Palestinian resistance to apartheid and/or occupation takes non-violent forms: according to Jamal, these forms have themselves been met with state violence since 1972. In this light, Netanyahu's coalition is a culmination, not a deviation; and so the increase of spastic violence at the extreme edges of the ideological border become explicable as inevitable. From LRB.
https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2023/november/on-non-violent-resistance?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=20231118icymiS&utm_content=20231118icymiS%20CID_c13bd5300a9a9604029b9637e1bd7a8f&utm_source=LRB%20email&utm_term=Read%20more&fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR0iKXmF0gKOhrkpQDkUAWEl-Q-puZIVTRhXJuCqtVGHYff4SmpYMTfKJVQ_aem_AZ4Sw9PGCnqBQ_Delgz07mnEXqXbhfcZoOXazSFTZj2PH-WoSRaZyS2K4I-0-_5RkqoB2E0qVl7pb1OByt4KG9ng
NOVEMBER 30, 2023. It is not an intransigent Left that is, or has been, preventing a peaceful two-state settlement of the problem called Palestine. What, then, if not merely the "other side," the Right? Could that integument be the national interest of the state called Israel, an entity that transcends these political valences? Here's an answer that goes beyond the platitudes and formulae that clot our thinking at present. From The Intercept.
https://theintercept.com/2023/11/28/israel-palestine-history-peace/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=The%20Intercept%20Newsletter&fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR1WmU2VMuraQh4l8q51wsmx5ef18Lv6lS-9KJZkWUceicO7uQfyszbhl8g_aem_AZ6wR-yRv72sH_mjYGy8VIm0LP30KlkOIPkKQrXRNZRyqTLgzxdcmPgmQjUfA1GZAWR8kEonyG-jbzh3Ew6OMf6u
DECEMBER 2, 2023. On the use of "human shields" in anti-colonial struggle. It's worth remembering that Samuel ("Mad Dog") Huntington made his bones by proposing "forced draft urbanization" in Vietnam as a way of separating combatants from civilians, thus removing "human shields" from the battlefield—the countryside—and creating cities (also increasing demand for agricultural production) where there were none. Just now that sounds almost civilized, don't it? From LRB.
https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2023/december/on-human-shields?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=20231202icymiS&utm_content=20231202icymiS%20CID_d99b8069439f2234b57d5e72fe0da004&utm_source=LRB%20email&utm_term=Read%20more&fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR2lWE2aCS68y0a6dScsmp8MGy8LSxmTc6x9qz0TFfJUKYkDanFM0E9hV4c_aem_AZ6juDa73nWm8QWf19h8fAWqcN9Nf-59AFDhR60rkuOaHOg414eANqVGn_luExhOv6b0CX7Rr43o0G-pRa_JOvC5
DECEMBER 3, 2023. Slavoj Zizek at his slippery best, or worst. The silence or embarrassment he mentions in closing is not, in my experience, the problem of the campus Left, but is rather the undiagnosed affliction of those who reduce the variegated critique of Zionism to a unitary rendition of anti-semitism, as per Bret Stephens, ADL, AIPAC, et al. From Project Syndicate.
https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/israel-settler-annexation-movement-reprises-blood-and-soil-ideologies-by-slavoj-zizek-2023-11?utm_source=Project%20Syndicate%20Newsletter&utm_campaign=1dd6461923-sunday_newsletter_12_03_2023&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_73bad5b7d8-1dd6461923-107115341&mc_cid=1dd6461923&mc_eid=5c47be853f&fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR0PmkZ5Dn7Iprdn8NlLzfEk2z4Mu3b9Cb3VG9wg8897Xjw8PNUYJvzgpxs_aem_AZ5jQeJTHi3_uyU8R_GhjBZsizSt3jitaF8xRBaVV2jWpwx7l3JXIw07a72PFp0GfSxigKvs7X7Iqw3yd1Ak6RX5
DECEMBER 12, 2023. [At “Democracy Now,” a conversation with Peter Beinert of Columbia and Omer Bartov of Brown on the weaponization of anti-semitism.]. Plain speech about the idiocy now roiling the higher circles of the higher learning. Elise Stefanik, a Harvard alumna and a craven supporter of the fascist who said "good people" marched on both sides in Charlottesville, cannot be taken seriously as a critic of anti-semitism. Proud to say that Professor Bartov is a former colleague at Rutgers.
https://www.democracynow.org/2023/12/11/campus_antisemitism_and_resignations?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR0wAdeG8d2u8i3qreEwpOTzqosHi0km9Nh9yzjoKe6dB6RXCO4_iiCtGNk_aem_AZ6C7b_NZofSVnMTFiJermG58ojjoFofagp4X36s85IJZ6_4QwBwqCjEYIxyhUYqX1ZBt_vBQBrvGQG5UvR0GVVA
DECEMBER 20, 2023. Judith Butler on the deadly equation of anti-Zionism and anti-semitism. These are not the same thing, and those who insist on the equivalence make themselves apologists for genocide in Gaza and accomplices in the crime of anti-semitism. God help us. From Boston Review.
https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/there-can-be-no-critique/?utm_source=Boston%20Review%20Email%20Subscribers&utm_campaign=073dc4830f-newsletter_12_20_23&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_2cb428c5ad-073dc4830f-41154981&mc_cid=073dc4830f&mc_eid=8d370063ed&fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR1DHpAWKQEwu6badJSLeYVvJ92Ut86OJW42H012voX6Fue0nVZVFgm1GvQ_aem_AZ59qMAUKSlYzT6MGQbrJZovKXqcLxGVw_CFufZDaRi_ctkp-GU9le0UpZFmEsyY0BjBRu3BJ9rwi3gm5a61HAhO
JANUARY 29, 2024. Seth Ackerman, who's been associated with Jacobin since its inception, is one of the smartest of contemporary writers on the Left. He's a careful scholar as well. In view of the evidence [for genocide in Gaza] he assembles here, is there a way to refute his argument? From Jacobin.
https://jacobin.com/2024/01/israel-gaza-war-genocide-biden?mc_cid=c9e2ccd33c&mc_eid=d90726a8b1&fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR1MXBsmpe26DxeP4EYSN-sjBKu5ozvU3087wsoiSb5pR3RywBTHTsQBsHc_aem_AZ5L7sE7VtJa8szLneWRHdCZJz3Ww2dhKcZsSidNvafijpcP-uolfuyKBy7otZKnRa59JhwWsXPJpO9vps62J_eQ
FEBRUARY 18, 2024. As good a summary of the current rhetorical—i.e., political— situation as I've seen, but of course it takes a Brit to bring the truth to our attention by, what else, citing our own Ezra Klein, who, like Peter Beinert, keeps growing because he keeps thinking. Yes, Netanyahu is a thug, like Trump, like Orban, like Erdogan, and he has two lunatics in his cabinet. Mere facts. From Prospect (UK).
https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/world/64896/the-horrors-of-7th-october-did-not-happen-in-a-vacuum.-why-has-this-become-unsayable?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR3kXmqKlCvV_OyMDvMq_ffVvGsO-z8XlkuPpLTzhfjwV9j3WttWWEgCWd0_aem_AZ5z6pL4fCjMlIWkJewkz-BmS7SWFA8T4Vrip5m67owuFOloo9HI9IGXpTa6sE3qy-sEcTtZokcHIaS9dGCXt00O
FEBRUARY 21, 2024. Nobody should have to call this essay from Rick Perlstein brave, because it's "just" honest historical inquiry. But in the current context, when revisionist Zionism—an explicitly fascist root of the family tree—regulates the discourse, that is what it is. For those of us who need a way to confront the vile history of racism in the US as a typical, even vital dimension of our shared past—not as a deviation from the norm—Perlstein's very personal essay might be a methodological model. From The American Prospect.
https://prospect.org/world/2024-02-21-neglected-history-state-of-israel/?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR1ygDHQZKCexDXA8I28JF48Q3_nVRM-b_wHjm5MxuDejIn_EBdEQALmblE_aem_AZ7S4-0eLONSfLWcMClNXMd_oP6kRNjYdaWErmv7iz3j-YJgbeis4gKEaJqPFzmPUwXEZJbOzQ944EzGihvDa8ST
MARCH 21, 2024. Last night over dinner, a couple of friends and I talked, obliquely of course, about what we "do" to compensate for our feelings of absolute helplessness in watching this atrocity unfold in real time. Mainly, read compulsively, and then--watch TV. Which only amplifies the feelings: talk about a doom loop. There must be some way outta here. From TomDispatch.
https://tomdispatch.com/armed-by-washington-israel-trashes-the-genocide-convention/?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR10pq86K0x1oc_M0Tnx4rDv2ANZXyP5DJGCSiBP5VtzXmWooaVH1bcTw38_aem_AZ41V_FdNN2zZswZ1mTZzQpaFr0OHKRbFdOLamZJIzjU8SM4q3pXmVBXgpH5g2y-ONMJSWYNIY-kZghQcAfXbYg9
APRIL 13, 2024. Now that a "two-state solution" is a dead letter, the choice for the people who will constitute what remains of Palestine boils down to liberalism or Zionism. If that must be the groundwork of debate, the slogan "from the river to the sea" loses whatever invidious intent, content, or connotation it has hitherto carried. This loss is a gift. From Foreign Policy in Focus.
https://fpif.org/the-break-up/?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR1guHD9zAJ7MwLwzydzr1CJjsqnTj_GQKHuXrwpeo3YZbTslNTpSi1dTXQ_aem_AZ64HS7cp2MXDqmQ0X_5MSzfJ9tysVpLVqz9OqPpAi5Okk6s2AZIfukuv-vejkOtYHAEPkvhYEODBGpWtNp8LQdN
APRIL 15, 2024. It is absolutely clear that Iran calibrated its understated and advertised response to Netanyahu's provocation--which was intended to bring the US directly into the regional conflict--with the advice and consent of Biden's administration. If Bibi now retaliates with force, it means that he is in touch with Trump's campaign, and wants a wider war to bring down Biden and to solidify his own position within the ultra-nationalist coalition that still governs Israel. Iran's response was not a mistake, in other words, or a sign of weakness: quite the reverse, and very promising in terms of the future, because the US can now play Iran against Israel in the Middle East.
APRIL 23, 2024. Speaking of Columbia. My old friend Bruce Robbins, a professor of literature there, has been involved in these issues and struggles for decades now, on campus and off. His is an authoritative voice, both deeply informed and passionately engaged. We should be listening to him, not the lunatics who quote the Bible in defense of genocide in Gaza. From LRB.
https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2024/april/at-columbia?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR2Tc3UozoUOaicEJ_RVnWZ79SaO_iP8Y4_KUXP190MC1zjZxMeVfBhd0dQ_aem_AZ61JqpLDX3nU5BWg6r1DkFx2W8lUWOf_HWuc_SzHAycNuy_2ZXrO2fQ3mBwlVKQfN8KMLuanMKPtHcHdbLdDa0g
APRIL 24, 2024. I've been saying this for weeks: Joe Biden loses to the malignant orange clown if he doesn't decide, and soon, to stop unconditional military aid to Israel. No more "This is bad, let's get a cease-fire." no more "If this, then maybe that." The New York Times has endorsed such a move, for God's sake. Where's the down side? The billionaires desert him? They already have, because they're stupid enough to believe that Biden means to destroy capitalism rather than merely fund a functioning welfare state. Wall Street money dries up? Nah, those guys know how to hedge their bets. The upside is obvious: the future of the party, the core constituency that got him elected last time, turns out this time instead of staying home.
APRIL 25, 2024. New York City Council Members with another eyewitness account of the encampment at Columbia, as complement to that of Bruce Robbins (below). Who you gonna call--or believe? These Ghostbusters, or the fascists in Congress? From CityandStateNY.com.
https://www.cityandstateny.com/opinion/2024/04/opinion-we-visited-solidarity-encampment-columbia-university-heres-what-its-really/395989/?oref=csny-skybox-post&fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR355WYKR7ZkRCkfmwfUuL0WLrCFU50Vp91QcdKmollU_x0HCRmGoEYDfB8_aem_AZ5PCBcH96Fw7mbXqfPmUQCXUvwb9bYF9I47sAhQtFZTFigyqGMRt6NDnmhHyCBLJz7amYA7TqsHcCDiB3qyjrBc
APRIL 29, 2024. Paul Berman's blithely ignorant argument here makes sense only if you grant him the two premises he assumes are self-evident: 1) Jewish students are being harassed or attacked on the Columbia campus; 2) "From the river to the sea" has one meaning, and only one, the "eradication of the Jewish state." The premises are demonstrably false, so the conclusion he draws--punish the faculty for their complicity in validating them--is silly at best, nihilist at worst. It is not incidental that Berman is the so-called intellectual whose extremely limited encounter with a founder of the Muslim Brotherhood induced in him a hysterical Islamophobia that spawned one of the worst of the profoundly stupid books that led us into the "war on terror." Nor is it an accident that his proposed punishment of the faculty is the exact analogue of the McCarthyist blacklist that drove the CP's fellow travelers out of the universities and the larger culture industry in the 1950s. From Washington Post.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/04/26/columbia-protest-students-faculty-gaza-unrest/?utm_campaign=wp_post_most&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&wpisrc=nl_most&carta-url=https%3A%2F%2Fs2.washingtonpost.com%2Fcar-ln-tr%2F3d888c5%2F662d1c66a702ee4d203ed647%2F596e8cc1ade4e25e028ef9bd%2F12%2F46%2F662d1c66a702ee4d203ed647&fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR2nTRY5s3HN2hiO_t11s93n3YSsWM-Fzn06zMNVOF89FEsct0_8WvPQt6A_aem_AZ7h1J2Qvl73AO0PPShYGjXg7YsG_bQNGALEfpyOhrRmtoCsmATd2xAEK5etcRBQAbjuBf0NArn8v34dD2KHUUol
APRIL 30, 2024. Bravo: Bruce Robbins debates the ardent Zionist Bret Stephens of NYT on Fareed Zacaharia's show. Absent logic, good faith, and evidence, Stephens alleges murderous intent on the part of the encampments. He gets particularly excited about the slogan "from the river to the sea," and declares that Israel has been singled out because it's a Jewish state. Robbins replies succinctly: 1) There is no credible evidence of hate speech or harassment from the encampment at Columbia; 2) "From the river to the sea" means equal rights for all persons who inhabit Palestine, Jews and non-Jews, a quintessentially American principle; 3) The reason young Americans are focused on Israel is simple: the genocide in Gaza is being conducted with the blessing and material support of their country. From CNN.
https://www.cnn.com/videos/tv/2024/04/28/gps-0428-campus-protests-spark-free-speech-debate.cnn?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR0ixL-pqMhugjJdHjUaGFGqT-BD94p5XVDMwoCpJobRpmygco6yeuwaJ3U_aem_AZ4TZCeV4XYgmX8D_-WWn2Ndz9kcn56Drk8cz68xjELQOifhrVyTHBeqQHF-JhMpmE4McqGCBa92SDTMmCoCd8HJ
APRIL 30, 2024. As far as I can tell, from eye-witness reports made by people who have actually been ON CAMPUS—people who teach at Columbia and/or who have been involved in the protests—the violence and the anarchy and the harassment of Jewish students that Stefanik, Johnson, and now Hoyer allege to be happening there is a fiction with no relation to the reality on the ground. How and why does it get repeated in the mainstream media as if it were mere fact? Does somebody have to die before we realize that this is one more dimension of the attack on higher education engineered by the likes of Christopher Rufo and the rulers of MAGA Nation? Before we realize that this unfounded narrative is one more dimension of their attack on "crime-ridden Democrat cities" and "invaders" from the other side of "our" borders, a.k.a. people of color? Before we realize that us liberals and progressives are already in their cross-hairs, more literally every day?
MAY 2, 2024. See the accompanying essay at The American Prospect by Harold Meyerson on university administrators as provocateurs. Almost hilarious.
https://prospect.org/power/2024-04-30-this-modern-world/?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR1qsWOOpEqKkpedPyEFEdWePmandrdnM0OrmNWmCwIXr222_xsod4qJN38_aem_AZ7MSJWiu5KcRvMtnfrRGOoTPb0cpB5HQN5_Y3CefC4bO1THvvgI5BNTcjR5UwJ2HOx6ZQBB6EuwBAqqmAfIE7GO
MAY 3, 2024. I don't see how to disagree with this. The demographics of the movement mirror a wider (and growing) gender gap that suggests male supremacy is a dead man walking who hopes, nevertheless, and as always, to be reanimated by the violence of war. I hope I'm wrong about that. From TomDispatch.
https://tomdispatch.com/the-distortion-of-campus-protests-over-gaza/?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR2AtrHRuyQPjmf0psk6yNmVx1Iglm7GY30RZuFtLXJQXaIdNCHCyIv7T_8_aem_AZ63VPYev9pb_c8RlqxL4B5iMxvjUQwCmIcMyTFcA0WEhuRGHcRQ9RhvX2rnVwczP-d2aRl-PjClj_rtzu1NOx84
MAY 9, 2024. Rick Perlstein nails it, as always. The parallels to the 60s are bullshit because the "provocation" this time around is nothing compared to what elicited military force (and reprisal) back then. At present, harm to Jewish students is absent or minimal, but thuggish attacks on protestors are already commonplace, and not just from the cops as enabled by idiot administrators. Like I said, does somebody have to die to prove that the protestors occupy the moral high ground? From The American Prospect.
https://americanprospect.bluelena.io/index.php?action=social&chash=c4f796afbc6267501964b46427b3f6ba.2708&s=449833c3704a0733c9567173e0f123fe&fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR02WNym7Zp1nvAovyfhPmGg1R5yue853RF9NCYc8VTw4rkGSV1wT0ne2_g_aem_AZ5xCX1hk-WxqEVZrMbYq0nHz3iIV0QafdfCy9vp5zIhSoi4yMIdijuCBCK5woafG7mR6qYzGCzAflB4OkoPDx5I
Bingo, as usual.