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Global Currents article

Restricting Free Speech for Palestine: Nine Responses to Prof. Claire Finkelstein’s Call


“Fight Racism, Fight Imperialism” poster. Photo via Flickr User S Pakhrin. CC BY 2.0 DEED.

Table of Contents

Introduction

(1) Prof. Adam Rzepka

(2) Prof. Atalia Omer 

(3) Prof. Ebrahim Moosa

(4) Prof. Fawzia Afzal-Khan

(5) Prof. Genevieve Lakier

(6) Prof. Mohammad Fadel 

(7) Prof. Nermeen Arastu

(8) Prof. Richard Oxenberg

(9) Prof. Tom Ginsburg

Introduction

It was no coincidence that the three presidents who were called by the US Congress on December 5th, 2023 to testify about “antisemitism on college campuses” were the presidents of Ivy League schools (Harvard, MIT, and The University of Pennsylvania). It was also no coincidence that all three presidents were women, and that one of them (Harvard’s) happened also to be Black. And so, as usual, impeccably seizing the political moment, the US Republicans had smelled blood and understood that they had in their hands a perfect storm opportunity, and, characteristically, immediately jumped into action.

First was the matter at hand: antisemitism, a subject that often shuts down debate and discussion. The Democrats would have no wiggle room and no choice but to side with their Republican colleagues (as they did, and with relish), no matter how vituperative and unfair and even flatly false the Republicans’ attack against the witnesses might get.

But second, and most crucially for the Republicans, here was a chance to expose, in their mind, the hypocrisy of liberal elites: They have no problem shutting down speech, creating “safe zones,” letting dissenting colleagues hang out to dry (and not infrequently, gang up on them), and firing those who persist in their unorthodox ways (tenure in many cases offering almost no protection) when it comes to topics that touch on the rights of women, LGBTQ+ communities, racial minorities, etc. Yet there they were, mum and tolerating what they, the Republicans (and the vast majority of their Democratic colleagues), described as “antisemitism” and “calls for genocide of the Jewish people.” Where were the safe zones and the requisite firings, the Republicans asked? Why were these demonstrations allowed to happen day in and day out, while hosting a simple lecture by someone outspoken in a politically incorrect way was often barred as a matter of course? Aside from the bottomless cynicism and the fantasy that the speech that they were calling out (calling for a ceasefire in a war zone where civilians were being slaughtered by the tens of thousands, and chanting demands for the freedom of a people oppressed and subjugated for soon a century) was antisemitic, the Republicans did have a fair enough point to make by bringing the liberal chickens back home to roost.

For me, the revolting spectacle during those congressional hearings had this one redeeming aspect to it: It was a salutary lesson for all to learn that when you start to restrict civil rights (in this case freedom of speech—and on campus of all places), no matter how noble your cause and your intentions may be, a time will most certainly come when the circumstances will make it impossible for you to resist being pulled by the forces of an establishment power wishing to assert itself to shut down the speech of majorities expressing sharp dissent (80% among Democratic voters and 56% among Republican voters, support an immediate and unconditional ceasefire in Gaza).

I sent an invitation to submit a reaction to Prof. Finkelstein’s Op-ed (published by the Washington Post on December 10th, 2023), where she calls for limiting free speech when it comes to pro-Palestinian demonstrations, to exactly seventy academics and activists. Each one of them was someone with whom I had previously corresponded and who always responded to my emails. Out of the seventy, fifty eight did not reply, seven declined to participate, and five agreed to write something. Out of those five, one changed their mind and withdrew, two wrote something, but a few days later, withdrew their pieces (with one of them citing that they were not tenured and so could not risk it), so that I was left with exactly two contributions. From there, and with the help of the two remaining academics who were sticking to their guts, we managed to get ten contributions after several weeks of pushing and pulling. At the very last minute, as if all of this needed more drama—and crucially, after I had shared my introduction (what you are reading)—one academic checked with their department and informed me that they needed to withdraw their piece! And so here we are.

I will let all those facts speak for themselves, as well as the nine pieces below. The reactions are listed below, in alphabetical order by first name.

Dr. Ahmed Bouzid
Producer and Host
The Humanity 8.0 Podcast

Reactions

Prof. Adam Rzepka
Associate Professor, English
Montclair State University

Prof. Claire O. Finkelstein’s op-ed extends a tradition of arguments from prominent legal scholars against constitutional rights in order to manufacture consent for war crimes executed or proxied by the U.S. I am reminded most directly of John Yoo’s infamous “torture memos”—the immediate application here is less atrocious, but the stakes are ultimately just as high. Finkelstein’s argument is effectively against the right of students and faculty to rely on the First Amendment in order to oppose a genocidal military campaign whose unconditional funding, supply, and political support is the current policy of our federal government.

As has been pointed out in other responses in this collection, the supposed rash of calls for “genocide against Jews” on campuses is a rhetorical phantom: such warnings are never accompanied by any actual examples. The slanderous implication that objections to Israel’s campaign in Gaza are aligned with violent antisemitism serves only one real purpose: to give institutional and intellectual cover for public acquiescence to what is at best a string of war crimes, almost certainly ethnic cleansing, and probably genocide, with the U.S. as its only foreign patron.

Like all such ideological covers, this argument necessarily proposes an abrogation of constitutional rights and the rule of law. In Finkelstein’s case, the forced consensus that genocidal violence must be lock-step public policy is the deeper point of the phrase “with or without the First Amendment.” Even on public university campuses, whose free speech standards must adhere to that amendment, calls for an end to the U.S.-supplied killing of some 3000 children per month in the Gaza campaign must also pass the test of whether or not those objections create a “hostile work environment” for specific ethnicities or national origins.

That last point is the most insidious one for public universities, especially, because it perverts the justice of Title VI and similar statutes by weaponizing them against objections to a specific government policy. Contortions like Finkelstein’s are already forcing cracks in longstanding free speech protections at public universities, which until now were set aside as a counterexample in the furor over private speech policies at Penn, Harvard, and Columbia.

At my public university, my own persistent advocacy for a ceasefire on our faculty discussion listserv quickly drew an anonymous complaint that I was creating a hostile work environment. For three weeks, I was banned from all speech on that listserv, without knowing any details of the complaint. When some (though not all) of these details were finally shared with me, the “investigation” was immediately dropped.

More than 2200 children in Gaza had been bombed to death in those three weeks. Nothing I could have said to the campus at large could have saved them, but I would have liked to speak out against this slaughter to those at my university who were publicly defending it. The next day, the university, in an effort to head off the flood of new harassment claims, unsubscribed all users from the discussion forum, effectively shutting it down. It did the same to the all-campus listserv, the only remaining channel of communication available to the full campus. Because of the way tactics like Finkelstein’s have manufactured a conflict between free speech and respect, we can no longer speak to each other as a community, for any cause.

***

Prof. Atalia Omer
Professor of Religion, Conflict, and Peace Studies
Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies/Sociology
Co-Director, Contending Modernities
Keough School of Global Affairs
The University of Notre Dame

If the conclusion drawn from the university presidents’ congressional hearing on antisemitism on December 5, 2023, is that academic freedom needs to be restricted, it reveals how dangerous it is for Jews to fall into the false equation of antisemitism and criticism of Zionism and Israeli policies of occupation, apartheid, and settler colonialism. Rather than combating antisemitism, Representative Elise Stefanik (a New York Republican)—who ignorantly equated legitimate recognition of Palestinian resistance (intifada) with an eliminative intent (genocide) in her interrogation of the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania—exposed the weaponization of antisemitism in the service of White supremacy. Ignoring her embeddedness in White supremacist discourse, Rep. Stefanik conveniently instrumentalized the fight against antisemitism to come across as riding a moral high horse (scolding the university presidents for supposedly supporting a far-fetched hypothetical scenario of calls for genocide against Jews, an accusation leveled at a time when, according to leading genocide and Holocaust scholars, actual genocidal actions are unfolding against Palestinians in Gaza). Rep. Stefanik’s prior parroting of the “great replacement theory” that deems “the Jews” as instrumental in facilitating the “replacement” of White Christian Americans with minorities is underpinned by actual forms of antisemitism, Islamophobia, and anti-Black racism. Indeed, regardless of the rhetorical efforts to separate antisemitism from other forms of racism, these bigotries are always interwoven.

We need to go no further than the chilling chants by White nationalists in Charlottesville in August 2017, “Jews will not replace us,” in a “Unite the Right” march protesting the overdue plan to remove a symbol of the Confederacy, which inflicts constant moral injury upon Black Americans. The dangers and fallacies of disentangling an analysis of racism from antisemitism likewise manifested in the mass shooting in Pittsburg’s Tree of Life synagogue on November 4, 2018. The shooter was primed to carry out his attack because he learned about the synagogue’s involvement with the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS) and their commitment to working with immigrants and refugees. In this way, his actions reflected the perverse influence of the “great replacement” theory. These examples illuminate the entanglement of anti-Black racism, xenophobia, Islamophobia, and reactionary White Christian nationalism with antisemitism. Hence, the congressional hearing gestures toward a moment of opportunity in a broader “culture war” against wokeness enabled by an entrenched Jewish and Christian Zionist infrastructure already in place. This infrastructure criminalizes and litigates Palestinian narratives through the equation and conflation of Jews with a nation-state (represented by an aggressive promotion of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance “working definition” of antisemitism). Thus, weaponizing antisemitism is convenient for such forces that have assaulted LGBTQI, migrants, Muslims, and other marginalized communities. Jews need to be alarmed by their persistent assimilation into Whiteness and their instrumentalization in policing academic freedom and debates on campuses.

***

Prof. Ebrahim Moosa
Mirza Family Professor of Islamic Thought & Muslim Societies
The University of Notre Dame

A new meme—a usage, a style, code phrases—that subliminally replicates in our minds an entire ideology, “genocide against Jews,” is taking root in American public discourse. Literally menacing, this meme did not surface when White militias were braying, “Jews will not replace us” at Charlottesville, VA in 2017 under Donald Trump’s rule. Trump endorsed that right-wing protest with his shameful claim that there were “good people on both sides” at that protest. Neither Israel nor its supporters in the US amplified that horrific meme as “genocide against Jews.”

As the defining moral moment of our time, the post-October 2023 groundswell of support for the Palestinian cause on US campuses and around the world, criticism of Israeli occupation and settler-colonialism gets maliciously perverted as “genocide against Jews.” Everything from academic conferences on Palestinian literature to protests by Jewish Americans are framed under this self-serving and diabolically designated meme. The goal is not to squelch critique of Israel but to outlaw it. Calls for limits to free speech advocated by people like Claire O. Finkelstein are part of a wider ideological project in support of an Israeli propaganda war.

This meme is a hoax and ruse to silence critical debate and should be called out for what it is: a bid to justify Israel’s atrocities and comfort its conscience over its serious human rights violations. Imagine White South Africans who favored apartheid racism complaining because criticism of racism made them feel uncomfortable? In fact, the parallel is inadequate: apartheid ruined the lives of millions, but no apartheid government murdered and targeted more than 20,000 defenseless people with 2,000-pound bombs. Defenders of Israel’s atrocities ought to feel uncomfortable for supporting horrific murders and the dispossession of Palestinians going back to 1948.

Advocates of speech restrictions are surreptitiously importing Israeli propaganda memes into our public and campus discourses. Such speech restrictions would not even be tolerated in Israel itself. But the chutzpah to upend US free speech codes beggars the mind. It is a covert attempt to curb the political tide against Israel’s privileged status in US politics and to whitewash that country’s settler-colonial atrocities against Palestinians with US taxpayer dollars.

***

Prof. Fawzia Afzal-Khan
Professor of English and University Distinguished Scholar,
Montclair State University

Claire Finkelstein’s Op-Ed in the Washington Post deserves condemnation for several reasons, most obviously for its call to curtail First Amendment rights upon which much of the integrity and independence of thought and expression, which is the strength of US academia, rests.

More or certainly just as insidious, for me, is the way her convoluted and bad faith (il)logic, opens the way for a convergence of the worst excesses of right-wing politicians and their academic counterparts.

By equating chants of “intifada” or “from the river to the sea” with calls for the genocide of Jews—arguing that such speech thus incites violence “against a discrete ethnic or religious group,” and thus requires  censorship of “free speech” tout court by college administrators—she is guilty of a disingenuous sleight of hand. By linking certain words and phrases to her interpretation of them, she is laying a trap of the exact same kind her congressional counterpart Elise Stefanik did, into which the presidents of UPenn, Harvard and MIT fell one after the other.

We should be clear, as these otherwise smart women were not: when Jewish Voices for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine chant “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be Free” they are not calling for genocide against Jews—many of them are Jews themselves! They are advocating for one secular and democratic state where all citizens can live together as equals. This is not possible in the current apartheid state of Israel, which has no right to think it speaks in the name of Jewish people of conscience: those who believe “never again” means never again for anyone!

If we in academia can’t debate and challenge illogical and pernicious views such as those of Ms. Stefanik and Prof. Finkelstein—to engage in the “dialogue” Finkelstein herself claims disingenuously to approve of—then the very foundations of critical thinking and vociferous, sometimes unpleasant debate we hold dear, never mind free speech, are doomed to extinction.

***

Prof. Genevieve Lakier
Professor of Law and Herbert & Marjorie Fried Teaching Scholar
The University of Chicago Law School

What a difference a month makes. A month ago, the public conversation about freedom of speech on American campuses took place in the shadow of a frightful specter: the image of antisemitic mobs who, according to Republican politicians, pro-Israel groups, and Claire Finkelstein, were rampaging across American campuses, calling for the genocide of Jews, with the permission or at least without the active constraint of university officials. That specter continues to haunt the imagination of some—and may continue to influence American law and university policy for years to come.

In the last month however, the story of speech on campus has become considerably more muddled. In the wake of South Africa’s arguments at the International Court of Justice last week—arguments that focused on the very real possibility that Israel has violated its obligations under the Genocide Convention of 1948—it has become increasingly hard to ignore the possibility that, when Elise Stefanik grilled the university presidents on their policies regarding genocidal student speech at the now infamous House committee hearings, the answers the presidents gave about their treatment of pro-genocide speech were more relevant to the pro-Israel speech on campus than the speech of pro-Palestinian groups.

This is not to suggest that the voices of pro-Israel students and supporters should be muzzled in the name of protecting students against genocide-encouraging speech. It is to suggest instead that there is a reason the college presidents—and American free speech law— is generally skeptical of efforts to identify exceptions to the ordinary principles of free speech, particularly when it comes to incitement. The reason is, of course, that judgments about what counts as (to use Finkelstein’s language) “hateful rhetoric” and “poisonous speech” are inevitably political judgments that can and have and—in the current climate—almost certainly will, if empowered, be used to repress political dissent.

This does not mean that there are no limits to what students or faculty can say. But it does explain why these limits are, as the university presidents explained at those hearings, very limited, particularly when it comes to protest and other kinds of speech. Ultimately her op-ed, with its deeply distorted understanding of what in fact is and has been taking place on campuses across the country, helps remind us of why it is so difficult to craft exceptions to the general free speech principles that do not swallow us whole.

***

Prof. Mohammad Fadel
The University of Toronto Faculty of Law

Professor Claire Finkelstein recently argued that imposing restrictions on speech on US campuses is necessary to combat rising antisemitism. Her examples, however, cite only politically protected speech.

Such speech is at the heart of First Amendment’s protections. As the unanimous 2014 Supreme Court decision in McCullen v. Coakley held, even facially neutral “time, place and manner” restrictions on such speech can be struck down when they proscribe more speech than necessary. Private universities, while not obligated to follow the First Amendment, would surely be impoverished if they did not permit as wide a latitude for political speech as possible. The Supreme Court has only recently reaffirmed that political speech may only be proscribed when the speaker has a specific intent to foment imminent violence. Finkelstein provides no evidence that students at Penn or elsewhere, when they use these phrases, intend the genocide of Jews. Some Jewish students might subjectively experience such words as threats, but that does not provide a basis in our law to restrict the speech of others. Professor Finkelstein implicitly admits that the speech she describes as genocidal is equivocal, describing it as speech that “arguably incites violence.” Precisely because it is equivocal, controversial political speech invokes other crucial functions of the university that Finkelstein endorses: “civil dialogue across differences, . . . cultivating critical listening skills, . . . [and] promoting the ability to engage in moral reflection and building resilience in the face of challenge.” Students advocating for Palestine are engaged in a serious political critique of Zionism based on its devastating impact on non-Jewish Palestinians. Jewish students at Penn or other universities may experience this critique as painful or even hateful, but they are not entitled to immunity from hearing political critique of Jewish nationalism. Resilience, too, is a value the university promotes.

***

Prof. Nermeen Arastu
Associate Professor of Law
Co-Director, Immigrant and Non-Citizen Rights Clinic
The City University of New York (CUNY) School of Law

Professor Finklenstein argues that University administrators should surpass existing systems of collective governance, accountability, and analysis (she brusquely writes off task forces and study groups) to make unilateral top-down decisions about what constitutes hate speech, a category with no fixed legal definition. The focus of her essay, political speech in support of Palestinian liberation and critical of the Israeli government, deligitimizes speech in defense of one persecuted minority currently facing unprecedented death and destruction in favor of another historically persecuted group.

Glaringly absent from her analysis are the harms that Palestinian students, faculty, staff and their allies face where their legitimate speech critical of an occupying government are dangerously categorized as an incitement of violence, or genocide. In the last months and beyond, these communities have already faced harassment, surveillance, and physical violence. They too, deserve an academic environment where they can access equal educational opportunities, engage in collective action and grief, debate the effectiveness of international human rights systems, and build community relationships.

For Finkelstein, these populations, equally in need of protection and safety, are invisible at best. At worst, Finkelstein falls under the trap of employing tropes commonly used against minority religious and racial communities from the earliest days of the formation of the nation: calling them uncivil, hate-filled, and implying their inability to engage in reasoned dialogue. This language dangerously sets the tone for the surveillance, criminalization, and over-policing of minority students that follows them and their families off campuses and into communities long into their adult lives.

***

Prof. Richard Oxenberg
Professor of Philosophy
Endicott College

It is not possible to fully distinguish between speech and action. We live in communities largely characterized by meanings embedded in language. Speech shapes the character of these communities and, therefore, can profoundly affect the emotional and social wellbeing of those who live in them. In this respect, speech is action. Hate speech is a form of emotional and social violence even if it never results in physical assault. I believe, therefore, that College administrators have a responsibility to prohibit hate speech on their campuses. The problem comes in trying to distinguish between true hate speech and legitimate political expression. Take, for example, the word “intifada.” Intifada might be translated “resistance,” or “liberation.” A call for “intifada” against the state of Israel is legitimate political expression. A call for “intifada” against “the Jews” crosses the border into hate speech, as it is suggestive of the antisemitic charge that “the Jews,” en masse, are an oppressive presence in the world. How and where to draw the line between legitimate political expression and true hate speech is a difficult question. Nevertheless, I do believe a line must be drawn. Calling for the genocide of Jews, or the lynching of blacks, or the persecution of any ethnic or religious group is speech that should not be tolerated in communities dedicated to the advancement of truth and knowledge. How and where to draw the line between legitimate political expression and true hate speech is a difficult question that would need to be carefully considered on a case-by-case basis.

***

Prof. Tom Ginsburg
Leo Spitz Distinguished Service Professor of International Law and Director of The Forum for Free Inquiry and Expression
The University of Chicago

Professor Finkelstein is the latest in a long line of academics, from both the left and right, calling for the repression of campus speech they don’t like. Her position is the logical outgrowth of our era, in which students’ feelings take priority, and the use of terms like “violence” and “safety” have lost any connection with their traditional uses. Violence is what is happening in Gaza, while American universities are among the safest places on the planet. Our universities, with their ever-large bureaucracies, have encouraged rhetorical drift, but in doing so, have undermined one of their core missions—to prepare students as citizens of a plural, democratic society in which they will encounter opinions with which they strongly disagree. In the United States, with the First Amendment, this means that even private universities need to prepare students for a world in which all kinds of horrific speech is allowed, and so should generally take the same approach as public universities. This doesn’t mean that universities have to allow everything: perhaps a true call for genocide of Jews ought to be disallowed, though we have not to my ears yet heard one on an American campus in the wake of Hamas’ October 7, 2023 attacks. Israeli policy is an obvious area of democratic concern, and so must be fully debated, even if some find the slogans of one or the other side offensive. Of course, protests and speech must be carried out peacefully, without physically intimidating others, shutting down speakers, or interfering with classrooms. But Finklestein’s call for content-based restrictions is doubling down on a policy that is failing students and undermining public trust in higher education.

 

 

3 Comments on Restricting Free Speech for Palestine: Nine Responses to Prof. Claire Finkelstein’s Call
Ahmed Bouzid
Dr. Ahmed Bouzid is the producer and host of the Humanity 8.0 Podcast and Editor at Large for The Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective. He is also the founder and CEO of Witlingo, a Washington DC-area based Tech company that specializes in deploying voice based Artificial Intelligence products and solutions.  His latest book is The Credo: On The Ills of Concentrated Private Power (The Credo Dialogs Series, January 9, 2024).
Global Currents article

Decolonizing the Relation Between Philosophy and Theology


Enrique Dussel in 2013. Image via Flickr User Secretaría de Cultura de la Cuidad de México. CC-BY-SA 2.0.

Since the 1980s, Enrique Dussel has been regarded as the most important scholar in the fields of philosophy and theology in Latin America. An early contributor to liberation theology (teología de la liberación), a pioneering leader in the concurrent field of liberation philosophy (filosofía de la liberación), all the while being a highly respected historian of the Catholic Church in his own right, Dussel’s work spanned fields, geographies, and world history in an effort to dismantle the Eurocentric and colonialist pretensions of modernity. His contributions to these academic fields are simply too numerous to begin to list here. Without a doubt, the epistemic decolonialization of these fields is at the front and center of his scholarship. However, the full potential of his work would be deficient if its reception were limited to a disciplinarily decadent interpretation that refused to cross boundaries. I argue that one of the most significant legacies of Dussel’s work is the urgency to rethink disciplinary divides with an eye toward epistemic decolonization. The relation between history and philosophy and the relation between history and theology are good examples of this interdisciplinarity. 

The fact that Dussel was a contributor to the emergence of both liberation theology and liberation philosophy has often resulted in a misguided, if not outright dismissive, reception of his work from the fields of theology and philosophy. On one hand, some theologians argue that his liberation theology is not properly theological due to the strong influence of Marxism on its development. They argue that this influence leads his theological work to be a merely Marxist secular philosophy in disguise. On the other hand, some philosophers argue that his brand of liberation philosophy is not philosophical enough due to its close historical and theoretical relationship with liberation theology. Ofelia Schutte argues, for example, that if his philosophical work is not simply a theology in disguise, then at least it is a secular imitation of liberation theology (174). This is the case even though Dussel himself never sought to blur the boundary between philosophy and theology. Instead, he kept a strict distinction between the two discourses based on a division between faith and reason. For him, whereas philosophy is geared toward a universal secular community of reason, theology is geared toward a particular religious community of faith.

One of the most significant legacies of Dussel’s work is the urgency to rethink disciplinary divides with an eye toward epistemic decolonization. 

Nevertheless, such formal distinction did not prevent creative and critical explorations of the ways in which the theological and the philosophical come together. In my view, these explorations are some of the most fertile moments in Dussel’s work. We see this in Dussel’s politico-philosophical study of Paul the Apostle. Here, a formal distinction between philosophy and theology is maintained in a way that seeks to overcome philosophy’s Enlightened secularism.

Picture of books in Spanish written by Enrique Dussel. Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

Without stepping into the ecclesiastical domain of theology, the philosopher can examine texts or topics that have traditionally been taken up in theology in the interests of determining a potential universal rationality. To be clear, this move is not the methodological discovery of a “philosophical theology” (which applies philosophical methods to elucidate theological frameworks) nor a “political theology” (which more narrowly analyzes the political field from the sectarian perspective of a religious tradition). As I have argued elsewhere, this move instead denotes the development of a dialectically postsecular philosophy that is invested in overcoming the ways in which the modern secular/religious divide has been falsely universalized through the coloniality of knowledge.

A more intricate instance of this exploration between the theological and the philosophical can be seen in Dussel’s The Theological Metaphors of Marx, a text that will be published for the first time in English translation in 2024. This text reconstructs Marx’s critique of theology as a critique of politics in a way that re-fashions political philosophy as an “anti-fetishist” philosophy of religion, where profane sacralization is diagnosed to be the root cause of political domination. While Dussel would write this text intermittently over a 20-year period parallel to the historical development of liberation theology, his argument largely stands on postsecularist philosophical grounds rather than theological ones. In this regard, it is similar to another heretically Marxist text: Ernst Bloch’s Atheism in Christianity, in which the German philosopher aims to establish a conversation between Marxism and religion “purged of ideology” (in the case of the latter) and “purged of taboo” (in the case of the former) (51). Interpreters who miss this methodological nuance end up all-too-quickly diagnosing the failure of The Theological Metaphors of Marx as a forced theologization of secular concerns. But this conclusion misses the entire point of the text, which is to rescue the critical value of theological metaphors as a critique of politics–which is to say, to probe the theological as the unspoken infrastructure of the politico-economic. It is in this way that The Theological Metaphors of Marx philosophically uncovers Marx’s own “proto-theology” or “implicit theology” made possible by the conceptual labor of a metaphorical language (18).

At the crossroads of the theological and the philosophical, the task of the decolonial postsecular philosopher is to diagnose the fetishisms or “false names,” which is to say, the false gods of the modern/colonial world that demand worship. This is why an atheist “anti-fetishism” is the very “first thesis” of liberation philosophy: it is an atheism of the fetish. And that secularism is one of these fetishes that plague modern philosophy is why a postsecularist impetus is important for the purposes of epistemic decolonization. 

This is not to say, however, that all “dialectics of secularization” are absolutely doomed to culminate in irredeemably colonialist and fetishistic dynamics, as the ideology of secularism has done in modernity. This is why there remains, after all, a distinction between philosophy and theology, itself based on a division between faith and reason. If one can diagnose the irrational fetishisms of modernity, it is because somewhere a critically emancipatory and universal kernel of rationality remains alive. “There is no liberation without rationality,” Dussel claims, “but there is no critical rationality without accepting the interpellation of the excluded, or this would inadvertently be only the rationality of domination” (36). Accordingly, epistemic decolonization can be recognized as the interpellation of the excluded that calls out the fetishisms of a colonialist modernity. Evidently, this is not a crude call for the abandonment of modernity, nor simply a reaction against it. It is, rather, a creatively dialectical critique that goes through modernity itself. In Dussel’s terms, it is a “transmodern,” project, rather than an anti-modern or a postmodern one. 

Decolonizing the relation between philosophy and theology is likewise not simply a matter of just blurring or undoing the boundaries between them. The lesson from Dussel’s work is to embrace the creative dialectics of decolonization which demands a new transmodern way of thinking about the points of mutual correspondence between philosophy and theology in a way that allows for liberatory interpretations of the world, beyond the fetishisms of modernity (such as secularism). At least this will be but one of the many legacies that his work will allow future generations to explore.

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Rafael Vizcaíno
Rafael Vizcaíno is Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at DePaul University. His work employs decolonial approaches to examine the intersections between race, religion, politics, and secularization. In 2020, he earned the American Philosophical Association’s Essay Prize in Latin American Thought. His first book (in final stages of revision) recounts the modern dialectics of secularization from the perspective of Latin American and Caribbean thought. His second book (in development) will examine the relation between philosophy of religion and political theology in the context of epistemic decolonization.
Theorizing Modernities article

Christian Zionism and the Apocalyptic Landscape of Gaza


View of Gaza Strip from Israel – October 2009. Image Credit: Flickr User David Berkowitz. CC By 2.0 DEED.

There is no use pretending that all we know about time and space, or rather history and geography, is more than anything else imaginative… imaginative geographical and historical knowledge.

–Edward Said, Orientalism (1978), 55.

Hamas’ October 7, 2023 killing of over 1200 people in Israeli communities bordering the Gaza Strip precipitated the vengeful and disproportionate Israeli state military assault of Gaza that has since taken many thousand more Palestinian lives (over 23,000 at the time of writing), and as a result mass displacement and a humanitarian crisis. Predictably, White American Christian Zionists explain and refract these events through the opportunist eschatological prism by which they see the world. Sean Durban explains that this is all part of God’s greater plan for his son, the messiah, to vanquish evil and bring about a millennium of Christian peace. These conclusions are especially difficult to read in the context of these events. Such imaginations of past and future are stuck on “orthogonal time,” a concept I borrow from Philip K. Dick to illustrate the ways in which such events are imagined to have always already happened as God’s future events for the apocalypse are set in time like a record on a turntable. Christian Zionists interpret the assault on Gaza as one such event, bumping the stylus forward as evidence of Christ’s imminent return. This temporality explains how Christian Zionist prophecies for Gaza naturalize these awful human—all too human—atrocities as fatalistic predetermination.

In this piece, and as a geographer of the apocalypse, I explore the ways space, and specifically landscape, is used as an instrument to (1) provide evidence of the imminence of Christ’s return, (2) to justify settler colonial erasure, and (3) reinforce Christian Zionist national identities. However, landscapes also open a liminal space for counter discourses. Ethnographic work with Christian Zionists reveals dissonate perspectives on the dominate discourse of erasure and colonization of Palestinian Gaza.

Most famous among the Christian Zionist commentators is Hal Lindsey. Lindsey is the author of the best-selling non-fiction book of the 1970s, The Late Great Planet Earth. Ever the Cold Warrior, Lindsey explained the 7/10 Hamas attack  as follows: “I consider it a precursor to the war prophesied in Ezekiel 38 and 39—a war led by Russia and Iran. And make no mistake, Russia is tied to this.” His perspective of omniscient fatalism is typical of dispensational premillennialist theology—the dominant evangelical eschatology that states Christ will return to Israel prior to the millennium—in orthogonal time. He explains that “Christians should remember that this did not catch God by surprise… his plan continues.”

Lindsey’s position illustrates the centrality of not just time within the Christian Zionist imagination, but also space. Conceptualizations of space bring us back to Said’s words in the epigraph; this “imaginative geography” allows Christian Zionists to predict the future, and in doing so close off its other potentialities by attempting to re-make the world from their maps about it. Rendering the apocalypse cartographically potentializes the present and actualizes the future as a method of persuasion by rendering the apocalypse visible, exploiting the specious infallibility of cartography, and reducing future complexity to the apocalyptic abstraction that erases both Palestinian and Israeli agency and presence as mere objects of future history.

Hal Lindsey’s Chart of Armageddon. Source: Lindsey, The Late Great Planet Earth. Image and permission courtesy of Tristan Strum.

Christian Zionists are a powerful political lobby and cultural force in both American politics and geopolitics. Domestically, “64 percent of Evangelical Republicans say [Israel] matters ‘a lot’ compared with just 33 percent of non-Evangelical Republicans and 26 percent of all Americans.” In other words, given that 38 percent of Republican voters are evangelicals, Israel is not simply an evangelical concern but a Republican issue. Christian Zionists are a central election base—both for campaign contributions and votes—that might determine Donald Trump’s future return to the White House in 2024. Geopolitically, and as Stuart Croft argues, the Christian Right has developed its own views on foreign policy that challenge Realist, Liberal, and Marxist positions, what he terms “evangelical foreign policy.”

Lindsey famously focused on geopolitics to explain prophecy, and in so doing avoided the austere and certain failure of apocalyptic date-setting. Michel De Certeau explains this modern god-trick tactic of transposing space and time: “to be able to see (far into the distance) is also to be able to predict, to run ahead of time by reading space” (36). But this focus on space by Christian Zionists is not limited to the global scale of geopolitics. I ask what is lost in our analysis of Christian Zionism by focusing only on its famous (mostly men) authors, its Hal Lindseys?

My current book project, The Future is Foreign Country, focuses on the landscape pilgrimage sites of the apocalypse, visited by over 100,000 American Christian Zionists each year. I’ve been conducting an ethnography in Israel/Palestine since 2008, travelling with dozens of Christian Zionist pilgrimage groups. The places of interest, where the coaches tend to stop and the pilgrims disembark, are not the places one would expect for Christians, i.e., sites of Christ’s miracles, but are instead landscape vistas from which pilgrims can look out and, as Stephen Daniels once succinctly put it, “picture the nation” (5) with its strength, beauty, history, and future.

Upon these landscapes, American Christian Zionists revere, even consecrate, a group of people—Jews—with whom they do not and cannot belong, and a territorial state—Israel—from which they usually cannot gain citizenship. Here the territorial fetishization of “the Jew,” as Jonathon S. O’Donnell argues, is an antisemitic construction for the proper place for Jews in Israel against which all other Jews are out-of-place globalists. This nationalism is religious at its core, sprung from a set of interpretations of the Bible that identifies the Jewish return to Israel as a prophetic sign of the imminence of the apocalypse. This is religion as nationalism where nationalism is embedded in their theology as a religious rite and portended expectation.

Why Landscapes?

Pre-American Civil War, America was imagined as the New Jerusalem in stark distinction to England where these new Americans created a “geoeschatolic and geoapocalyptic consciousness… of the sacralization of an alternative place within the eschatology and apocalyptic drama of salvation and redemption” (Zakai 1992, 72). During the Reconstruction Era (1863-1877), however, Palestine figured prominently in American popular culture. In particular, pilgrimage narratives and guidebooks found a market far beyond the small number of Americans who actually crossed the sea. Pilgrimage to Palestine’s landscapes was one of self-imagination and renewal after the deep and divisive scars of the American Civil War. Palestine became these pilgrims’ new and unadulterated origin story, divorced from Europe and the troubles at home in America. As Hilton Obenzinger illustrates, “Travel to Palestine allowed Americans to read sacred geography…. While the persistent preoccupations with the Bible and biblical geography stood at the ideological core of American colonial expansion, actual travel to Palestine allowed Americans to contemplate biblical narratives at their source in order to reimagine—and even to reenact—ethno-religious national myths” (5). Palestinian landscapes were, as John Davis points out in his magisterial book, The Landscape of Belief, sacred spaces and the medium for American national self-definition for Protestants. They served as an anchor of morally pure beginnings.

This nationalism is religious at its core, sprung from a set of interpretations of the Bible that identifies the Jewish return to Israel as a prophetic sign of the imminence of the apocalypse.

Christian Zionists seek landscapes for three main reasons: (1) When 19th century White American Protestants arrived in Palestine, most of the urban sacred sites and buildings in Palestine were already claimed by non-Protestant groups. (2) Combined with the Protestant rejection of idolatry, such claimed space helped foment the rejection of monuments, buildings, and cities. Like early Jewish Zionism, the soil itself served a validating purpose. Davis explains “that Christians should put their trust in the soil of Palestine rather than the urban sites of Orthodox and Catholic tradition became a fundamental precept of most American activity in the region” (46). (3) Landscape creates an open space for Christian Zionists to perform their beliefs with abstract generality from afar, and without counter discourses of Palestinians. If the landscapes of Israel can be possessed through performative definition, then so too can the credentials of truth and faith be possessed, validated, and confirmed. To possess the landscape is to possess the truth.

These performative apocalyptic logics are not only a form of terra nullius (empty land), but also more specifically the imaginings of a spatial vacuity of Palestinians and Palestine, a vacuum domicilium (empty of inhabitants). This is what Christopher Pexa more generally frames as “settler colonialism’s exterminatory logic and its apocalyptic temporality” (4). Christian Zionist settler imaginaries find justification for colonization through the pre-emptive logic of terra nullius as orthogonal time. In other words, terra nullius is perceived as a rational pre-emptive logic of natural law with material consequences for appropriating inhabited lands.

Landscape is a masculinist visual representation and as such an ideological subject position, in this case, an imperial one taken up by a particularly powerful religio-political group. Scripting landscapes or “landscaping,” despite giving the illusion of being simply static and inert objects, are processes. I focus on the scripting and practices through which both landscapes and national subjectivities are constructed. Landscapes are often argued to be objects or stages upon which they are attributed meaning. And as meaning is applied to landscapes through various social mediums, they also naturalize operations of power by simplifying them through the erasure of that which does not fit their imaginings. In this case the presence of Palestinians. Landscaping is therefore an organizing principle that sustains mystification and is constructed through performances: dances, tears, prayers, sermons, gestures, tour guides, books, pamphlets, and various Bible translations. Landscape is not just iconographic or performative; it can produce a hegemonic experience.

Landscape is a masculinist visual representation and as such an ideological subject position, in this case, an imperial one taken up by a particularly powerful religio-political group.

Landscape is of course open to other future imaginings and while the Hal Lindseys in the movement hold significant interpretive cultural capital, my ethnographic work upon these landscapes, by embedding myself within pilgrimage tours, illustrated moments of dissonance with such dominant narratives. Nearly every day during Operation Cast Lead (2008–9), I travelled with Christian Zionists to Sderot, a town bordering Gaza. We delivered food to elderly residents as Kasam rockets regularly fell. At the end of each trip, we travelled to a landscape location that was about 100 meters from the official “press hill,” and 200 meters from the Gaza border. The edge of Gaza City was visible but blurred by the humidity and smoke. We were there to watch the war take place on the landscape, a kind of setting sun on our “benevolent” acts in Sderot.

Christian Zionists watching the war from Sderot. Source: Tristan Strum.

The lookout was a theatrical performance which served as evidence for many pilgrims that God’s work was being done by the “the world’s most moral army,”a common legitimating phrase at the time invented by the Israeli Occupational Forces. Edward Said argued that all representation was of a theatrical nature, “the idea of representation is a theatrical one… a theatrical stage affixed to” (63) the national origin of the viewer. Despite seeing the various dense pluming puffs of white smoke that signified an Israeli bomb, it was the sound of the war that was most arresting and affecting; the sound of the bombs themselves that could be felt most acutely as the shock waves pushed through our bodies. It was here in this embodied landscape space that imaginations of Palestinian erasure were challenged.

I asked one of the American leaders of the trip what he thought about the ceasefire, and he replied: “The wars will never stop. My father said it would be the last war when I was a child. There have been five wars since. We must realize that there cannot be peace.” He then mimed a crash by bumping his fists together, and continued, “They will have their land we will have ours. Just separate, but not in peace…. Muslims are a people of death, and Jews and Christians are peoples of life.” This man was willing to concede that Palestinians did deserve land or at least that they would stubbornly never let it go. Such a concession is marginal, but nevertheless a discourse that challenges the dominate settler colonial discourse of Hal Lindsey’s erasure of Gaza as a prophetic event to make way for Christ’s return.

End Time

Israel’s 2023-24 military assault on Gazans is interpreted by Christian Zionists through an orthogonal apocalyptic lens that prophesizes a future settler colonialism of Gaza. The cultural capital of Hal Lindsey-type voices reinforces the eschatological fatalism that Christ’s return necessitates Palestinian erasure and hollowing out of Gaza. Lindsey and other powerful men like him, have, to borrow the words of Sacvan Bercovitch, converted “geography into eschatology.” As such, their imaginative geography of Palestinians being “out-of-place” to justify further atrocities as inevitable, even sanctioned by God, is awfully predictable. But as I theorize, the space of apocalypse does not operate just at the global geopolitical scale, but is crucially performative of the landscape. Their apocalyptic future is a foreign country where they advocate for a religious nationalism in a state of which they normally cannot become citizens. Such advocacy is predicated on a Christian eschatological discourse about a narrative of future affairs they believe to be infallible.

Christian Zionists thus attempt to performatively make the anticipated spatialization of the apocalypse tangible, and present, in the landscape through the insulated practice of American Christian Zionist pilgrimage in Israel/Palestine. Landscape is performed to tell a story about the virtual future, which becomes reinforced as everyday practice in the present by the tour guides, pastors, and the tour group. Crucial to understanding this co-constitution of landscape and nationalism is how it is performed not only as a place to see but also foresee. In a more recent article, Lindsey subtly conflates Palestinians with the devil. Quoting Ephesians 4:26–27 (NKJV) he helps his readers foresee and therefore justify Israel’s plans for Gaza: “do not let the sun go down on your wrath, nor give place to the devil.”

Landscape is performed to tell a story about the virtual future, which becomes reinforced as everyday practice in the present by the tour guides, pastors, and the tour group.

Ethically, the cultural “politics of hope” that Arjun Appadurai defines as a “politics of possibility over a politics of probability” is not always a progressive one (3). Anticipated spatializations of Israel are hopeful and eventually performative of exclusionary practices that mete-out Palestinians as at best racialized unwanted interlopers and at worst embodiments of evil as the Antichrist’s army. This said, the narrative is at times a contested one, though these spaces of pilgrimage are most often closed-off from transculturation due to the cloister of the bus and the oblique distance of landscape. It is here on the pilgrimage landscapes where discursive dissonance, and the inescapable question of the fate of people, namely Palestinians, are confronted by Christian Zionist pilgrims; where, as Rob Shields notes, “the ‘near,’ or the face-to-face and present-at-hand, [must confront] the ‘distant,’ the future, and the possible” (22).

I hope this piece encourages scholars of religion—and specifically apocalypse—to think about the geographies produced by their research subjects and how such spaces, in this case landscape, have co-constitutional affects. Landscape in this research reinforces Christian Zionist identities by providing evidence for a biblical apocalypse, and as such, the orthogonal time of apocalypse expects Palestinian erasure as a necessary precondition for Christ’s return and rule on Earth.

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Tristan Sturm
Tristan Sturm is Senior Lecturer in Geography at Queen’s University Belfast. He is the Director of the MA in Geopolitics and a Fellow of both the Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice and the Centre for Apocalyptic and Postapocalyptic Studies (CAPAS) at the University of Heidelberg. He is interested in apocalyptic thought related to climate change, conspiracies, and religious movements in the USA and Israel/Palestine. He has published over 30 academic articles and is co-author of the book, Apocalyptic Conspiracism (forthcoming with Bloomsbury), and co-editor of Mapping the End Times (Routledge) and The Handbook of Apocalypticism and Millennialism (forthcoming Bloomsbury). He has disseminated his findings in the Toronto Star, Haaretz, Jerusalem Post, National Post, THE Magazine, BBC Radio 4, ITV, BBC Newsline, among other media spaces.
Global Currents article

Thinking From Vulnerability, Enrique Dussel (Z”L)


Enrique Dussel at the Forum To Read in Freedom of the XIX International Book Fair, in Mexico City. Image Credit: Maritza Ríos / Secretariat of Culture of Mexico City, via Flickr. CC BY 2.0 DEED.

During a very hot South African evening in January 2016, I was sitting with Enrique Dussel in the backyard of an architecturally styled colonial bed and breakfast. A few weeks before, on Christmas Eve, he had turned 82. At this time, his body was likely fragile but his engagement with the work of others was as powerful, insightful, and constructive as ever. Having made the long trip from Mexico City to Pretoria, I remember asking him multiple times if he wanted to rest, but his mind was restless and relentless. Subverting the genealogy of the Judeo-Christian tradition was “too important” and thus “deserved five minutes more” (or to my delight over two-dozen “five minutes more”).

These extra hours of engagement were in addition to our work together as a part of the same teaching cohort at the University of South Africa Decolonial Summer School. Though jetlagged, I kept trying to take as many mental notes as possible. As one of the hundreds and hundreds of people around the world who enjoyed these personal dialogues with Enrique know, these conversations were events. The dialogues were part of an effort to build a future imaginary around a socially committed goal. It was not a naïve utopia Enrique desired to build, but, adapting Karl Marx to 20th global south realities, it was a solidarity movement built around what he called an “energetical principle,” a force that could guide theories and praxis for the generations to come.

After a few dozens of those “five minutes more,” a flood irrupted, but the conversation was not interrupted. But when it became impossible to ignore, we started walking toward his room so he could get a deserving rest. He gently but firmly grabbed my arm not to fall in the wet stone and kept conversing with me with even more vehemence than before. He fully acknowledged his physical vulnerability, but this challenge only seemed to grow with this acknowledgement. It is true that the passage from individual to social vulnerability requires a more sophisticated reflection. But this is precisely one of the tasks he had taken by radicalizing the asymmetrical Levinasian encounter. For Emmanuel Levinas the encounter with an other demands our attention because their vulnerability creates the possibility for a different intersubjectivity, one that rejects the “imperialism of the same.” For Enrique, the encounter with another demands our attention because their vulnerability creates the possibility of a different society that rejects actual political imperialism and colonialism.

It was not a naïve utopia Enrique desired to build, but, adapting Karl Marx to 20th global south realities, it was a solidarity movement built around what he called an “energetical principle,” a force that could guide theories and praxis for the generations to come.

If one can see a thread in the longstanding and incredibly prolific contributions of Enrique, it is precisely this geopolitical thinking “from vulnerability” of those who are not “the same.” The fact that two of his most important interlocutors (Marx and Levinas) are European-born Jews is not a coincidence. After critiquing Descartes’s division between mind and body, he argued that in the globalized history set by European philosophy, Jewish thought, which emerged from experiences of vulnerability, was a potentially revolutionary philosophical tradition that demanded attention, study, and (as soon we will see) radicalization from outside of Europe. This is why already in the 1970s, while generating his philosophy of liberation, he re-imagined how the world looked different from “The Greek” and “The Hebrew” perspective. The Greek, especially under the imperial categories hijacked by Western Christian imperialism (occluding the Islamic contribution to historical re-interpretations of it) represented the impossibility of “slave emancipation.” The Hebrew, the suffering language of people passing through multiple oppressive colonialisms represented, especially in pre-Holocaust Europe, the power of vulnerability that enabled “the possibility of the revolution of the poor.”

He understood the necessity of thinking power from vulnerability through his engagement with Marx, Levinas, and others (some Jewish, some from many other vulnerable communities). While recounting his experience of reading Levinas, Dussel argued that it produced a “desquiciada repulsion” (subversive overthrowing) for “all that he had learned until then,” i.e., the Greek. But as he attested to over and over again when writing from exile after pro-western reactionary forces destroyed part of his house (including his library) in Mendoza, Argentina, experience and thought are not divorced from one another. He also experienced this overthrowing repulsion when he received an interpellation working as a laborer close to Nazareth. After showing admiration for the Spanish conquistadors (“who conquered the Inca empire with few soldiers”) he was asked: “Who were the powerful and who were the vulnerable in that situation?” Understanding that the history of the peoples of the so-called “Americas” should be retold, he began to think again “from exteriority,” but this time from another geopolitically located position. For this reason, when he encountered Levinas in person, he asked if “the Other” the Jewish philosopher was speaking about could be  “Indians slaughtered during the conquest of the Americas,” “Africans who were made slaves,” and “poor people” in a dependent system of global inequality. While Levinas in an interview shows his delight that young Latin American intellectuals saw “the same thing,” Dussel reports that Levinas’s answer was (perhaps in a methodologically Jewish manner) to return the question to his young Global South interlocutors: “it is something for you to think about.”

The relentless and restless Dussel took up the challenge. In dialogue and in a way that radicalized other relative exteriorities, he started to think with and from vulnerable communities of colonial western modernity. Dussel asked himself how to think from Latin America, a rich and diverse and yet wounded continent of “colonized, humiliated and dependent” communities. In Enrique’s thought, this does not negate the existence of a clear distinction between “the Greek” and “the Hebrew.” But this distinction does not account for everyone in the world. There are exteriorities that have been occluded by the Euro-American modern/colonial system and he was committed to explain why and how, and to learn from them. While his desire for encyclopedic knowledge led him to explore thought from around the world (China, Asia, Africa…), this was not just to contest the Orientalist project that constructed the other as in opposition to the European, but also to critique what Latin Americanists will call the Occidentalist project. The later occludes the other and rejects the possibility of alternatives. So while the rejection of Orientalism leads one to question the construction of difference, the rejection of Occidentalism requires one to also explain that there are other possibilities for living beyond the uniformity of the European model. For this reason, these other exteriorities became a key thread of his work.

There are exteriorities that have been occluded by the Euro-American modern/colonial system and he was committed to explain why and how, and to learn from them.

This is precisely the argument that my jetlagged brain was able to collect on that hot and rainy Pretoria night. In search of these alternatives, we can learn two lessons from Enrique on how to critique the post-World War II western consensus that led to the construction of “a Judeo-Christian tradition.” Both lessons remind us that there are other alternatives beyond the totalization and the uniformity of imperialism in the west. First, the west occludes the alterity of what Levinas calls “the Hebrew” by incorporating Jews into the western “Judeo-Christian” after almost two thousand years of persecution and genocide. Second it occludes the distinct alterities of what he called “the poor, the Indian, and the African” that are now represented in Latin America as lesser forms of “popular Christianity.” In actuality, these communities could foster creative resistances and re-existences for those who suffered persecution and genocide for over five-hundred years.

This is not to say, it is important to clarify, that Enrique was after “pure alternatives.” He departs from the conception that colonialism has violated all the world, and claims that not all alternatives were swallowed and that liberatory cracks exist and are opening every day. But as the system, from the very first years of the conquest of the Americas, used collaborationism to achieve its aims, we can find implications throughout the communities of the vanquished. For this reason, he will argue that a transmodern project can only be built with the encounter of members of these communities engaging in a dual critique: against the empire and against problematic modern/colonial reproductions and collaborationisms within these communities. This is why he protested against western imperialism, even at the risk of speaking openly about the treatment of Palestinians by a state that declared itself in Hebrew (and English) as representing all Jews. And when analyzing the history of Christianity in Latin America, being the editor of a monumental work with multiple volumes, he wrote again and again about the different roles that the Church and Catholic communities have played in Latin America. He does depart from a positive reaffirmation of what has been occluded (analectics). But he does so by supporting a dual critique that becomes a challenge to romantic purisms.

While today recounting the personal encounters with Enrique look idyllic, they were a part of committed work that resisted purism. In this sense, they were always events. Hundreds of hundreds of people initiated committed intellectual work following those memorable conversations. My work on Latin American Jewish thought, crossing occlusions and rejections across borders, would not have been possible without his contributions and his active dialogue with other Jews and Latin Americans, from Marc Ellis to Michael Lowy and Walter Mignolo to Maria Lugones. And thousands and thousands more will keep such work up by engaging his scholarship. This is especially true when he permanently challenged conceptions of individual ownership of work by making his texts readily available online for free at https://enriquedussel.com/ . So let us remember Enrique as someone who challenged us to keep building transmodern critical solidarity movements from the perspective of vulnerable exteriority.

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Santiago Slabodsky
Santiago Slabodsky is the Florence and Robert Kaufman Chair in Jewish Studies at Hofstra University in New York. He is co-director of the journal Decolonial Horizons/Horizontes Decoloniales at the GEMRIP institute in Latin America and convener of the summer program of Liberation Theologies and Decolonial Thought at the Global Dialogue Center in Spain. In the past he was co-chair of the Liberation Theologies unit at AAR, convener of the PhD Program in Religion, Ethics and Society at Claremont School of Theology and associate director of the center for Race, Culture and Social Justice in his current institution. Concurrently to his permanent posts in the US, he has served as visiting professor at institutions in the Netherlands, South Africa, Spain, Costa Rica, Macedonia, and Argentina and has lectured throughout Europe, the Americas, Africa, South East Asia, and the Middle East. His book Decolonial Judaism: Triumphal Failures of Barbaric Thinking received the 2017 Frantz Fanon Outstanding Book Award from the Caribbean Philosophical Association.
Theorizing Modernities article

The Political Theology of Traditionalism: Steve Bannon, the Far Right, and the End of Days


End of the World, Blue hour in Dirranbandi, Queensland, 2021. Via Wikimedia Commons.

In January 2017, newly elected president Donald Trump instituted Executive Order 13769, ostensibly to “protect the American people from terrorist attacks by foreign nationals entering the United States.” The order, in effect, limited immigrants, refugees, and visa-holding foreign nationals from several majority-Muslim countries from entering the US. It marked Trump’s delivery on his campaign promise during the 2016 presidential election to ban Muslims from entering the US. Behind the scenes, numerous reports indicated that it was Trump’s former campaign manager and presidential advisor, Steve Bannon, who orchestrated the planning and execution of this ban.

What was Bannon’s motivation for crafting such a ban? While Bannon’s nationalism and “America First” political ideology are no doubt linked to modern American White Christian nationalism, in this post I’ll suggest that another important influence on him is an esoteric intellectual movement called Traditionalism, which has its roots in the anti-modern perennial philosophy of René Guénon (d. 1951). More specifically I’ll suggest that Bannon’s political theology—a concept I ascribe to Traditionalism because of its assumption that spiritual and political realms are one and the same—is rooted in the cyclical notion of time laid out in Guénon’s work. This notion of time, I argue, helps us better comprehend the chaos of the early Trump days, the speed and alacrity with which the Muslim ban was implemented, and an alternative political theology of the Far Right. With different points of emphasis than mine, authors such as Benjamin Teitelbaum and Joshua Green have also documented the influence of Traditionalism on Bannon, even in the implementation of policies like the Muslim ban. I aim to deepen this account by showing its presence not only in his work on the Trump campaign but in the longer arch of Bannon’s career, specifically in his documentary films. Bannon, I contend, is not a fully-fledged Traditionalist in the vein of Italian theorist Julius Evola, or more recently the Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin. However, Bannon does often make use of Traditionalism in his work, and it is thus important to grapple with this form of thinking if we are to better understand its influence on contemporary far-right politics.

There is always a risk in devoting increased attention to a figure like Bannon, who has been a driver of an increasingly authoritarian and oppressive turn in US politics. My aim here, however, is to take him seriously so as to better understand his place within a tradition of right-wing thinking that is not new, despite its treatment as such oftentimes in the media. When we do so we are reminded of the consequences of implementing this philosophy in the past and developing strategies for countering it in the present.

Guénonian Traditionalism

Guénonian-inspired antimodern Traditionalism has been on the rise around the world, in such places as the US, Brazil (via the late Olavo de Carvalho), Russia (via Alexander Dugin), and Great Britain (via King Charles III). As his failed attempt to build right-wing nationalist movements in Europe following his firing from the White House shows, Bannon himself perceived the US as but one manifestation of a wider global struggle to be fought against the forces of modernity.

Guénon argued that there is a primordial tradition from which all the various other traditions branch. This tradition no longer exists in its pure form, but its vestiges are present in the various traditions we commonly call “world religions.” To be a Traditionalist, as Mark Sedgwick has shown, is to believe that one must be initiated into one of the world’s living religious traditions to partake in the primordial tradition. One has to commit to a particular religion in order to take part in the universal. This is what it means to participate in the primordial tradition in the present. For Guénon and others, it was in the traditions of the “East” that the primordial tradition was closest to being preserved. And it was in an elite vanguard that tradition could be carried forward. In the west, Traditionalists saw the onslaught of the characteristic modern values of materialism and individualism as adversaries.

From his earliest years in the Navy to the present, Bannon has engaged with Traditionalist thought. What is counterintuitive about Bannon’s use of this political theology is not only the fact that several of its most significant thinkers practiced Islam (to varying degrees of seriousness), but also that this vision of tradition assumes that communal exclusivism is an expression of a more foundational inclusive vision of the global political community. What is less counterintuitive is that several of the thinkers associated with Traditionalism were more than happy to test their ideas via the fascist politics of Europe during the early twentieth century. While Traditionalism itself was not by any stretch of the imagination the only (or most significant) source for fascist political philosophy, the fact that several of its leading proponents saw in fascism a potential political home for their more esoteric spiritual beliefs draws our attention to its potential to act as a violent and racist ideology.

Cyclical Time and the End of Days

For Guénon, time is cyclical rather than teleological. As he lays out in The Crisis of the Modern World (1946), it is a cyclical notion of time that the primordial tradition teaches, and this is most clearly preserved in Hinduism. Drawing on his interpretation of the Hindu doctrine of Manvantara, he contends that time moves from a Golden, to a Silver, then Bronze, and finally Iron age.[1] The final age is a “dark age,” or Kali-Yuga. We have been in this age for 6,000 years, according to Guénon, and are reaching a point at which the world as we know it is ending. Modernity, with its rampant materialism, is for him the culmination of this descent into darkness. Our descent into the Kali-Yuga has meant that we have moved further and further away from this original tradition. We can only see glimmers of it in the “west,” mostly in the Catholic Church. Given time’s cyclical nature, however, Guenon admonishes us not to despair, “for . . . the end of the old world will also be the beginning of a new one” (18).

While Traditionalism itself was not by any stretch of the imagination the only (or most significant) source for fascist political philosophy, the fact that several of its leading proponents saw in fascism a potential political home for their more esoteric spiritual beliefs draws our attention to its potential to act as a violent and racist ideology.

Among the more specific signs that Guénon argues are indicative of a decline into the Dark Age include the rise of individualism and the falling away of caste distinctions. For Guénon and other Traditionalists, a caste system that placed a spiritual elite at the top and manual workers at the bottom was the natural order of human society. The increase in an individualist ethos, especially one that treats all humans as equal because of their status as consumers, erodes the caste system in the “west.” In tandem with the falling away of caste and the rise of individualism is the ascendance of the value of equality and its attendant institutionalized political form in democracy. Over and against such a vision of society Guénon promoted a hierarchical social order rooted in a primordial tradition, where people know their place, and because they know their place (whether as a cook, blacksmith, mother, or father) had a clear meaning and purpose in their lives. This political theology sought to preserve hierarchy, suppress the individual, and enforce conformity to an ideal only known by a select few.

Bannon’s Traditionalist Political Theology

Bannon expresses his arguments in “documentary” films and in interviews. His films evince the drama that one would expect from a person who believes that we are in the midst of a dark age. This is especially clear in his documentary Generation Zero (Citizens United, 2010). The film adopts a cyclical view of American history, citing William Strauss and Neil Howe’s The Fourth Turning—An American Prophecy, which itself dabbles in Traditionalist approaches to temporality. Importantly, like Guénon, they see the 4th cycle in American history much like the Kali-Yuga. The cosmic nature of Bannon’s own view—and his adoption of a Traditionalist account of temporality—is clear in the way he depicts the cycles of time in the documentary. The first image in a section in the film on cyclical conceptions of time is an image of a sundial, which is then followed by the movement of gears inside of a gold-plated clock, a depiction of the Big Bang, the formation of the planet Earth, life itself in its cellular form, a butterfly appearing from a cocoon, and so forth. What all this is meant to imply is that the decline we are experiencing in the US is not simply a story of one nation’s decline, but the story of decline on cosmic proportions. Further, this story of decline is one that calls for urgent action because we, along with the rest of the world, are at risk of falling into an abyss if we do not “do something” soon. In this case, doing something means preserving the hierarchical order of tradition over and against the forces of modernity. Given this doom-laden view which characterizes our current dark age, it is unsurprising that one would rush to implement policies like the Muslim Ban that lack pragmatism and strip individuals of rights in the name of so-called unity. Whether or not implementing these policies stave off a descent into chaos, or merely preserve a hierarchy that will take over after the current age passes, is not fully explained by Bannon. For Guénon, however, it is clear that in preserving the hierarchical order as best we can now, we hold out the chance of shaping a new order in this form when it has to be reconstituted in the future.

There are recurring images in Bannon’s work that also mark a decline in particularly Traditionalist ways. In both his movie on Ronald Reagan, In the Face of Evil: Reagan’s War in Word and Deed (Bannon Films, 2004) and Generation Zero, the decline is almost always represented by the disintegration of gender roles and the rise of sexual liberation, both of which require the proliferation of individualism that Traditionalists abhor. Images of minorities are rare in his films, but when they are pictured, it is typically of African Americans with afros, wearing sunglasses, and giving speeches about revolutionary action. Here, the image is meant to evoke fear in the minds of his mostly White conservative audience. These films convey a “cautionary” representation of heedlessness and rejection of authority that is deeply resonant with Traditionalism. Only by preserving the “proper roles” of men and women and a racialized caste system could a proper social order be maintained. Bannon did not adopt all of Guénon’s or other Traditionalists’ arguments—he differs from them in his evaluation of Islam and his belief in the “working class” as the people who will save us from modernity’s corruptions—but he does seem to have accepted a notion of cyclical time and the urgency to act that our descent into the dark age calls for.

Running Out of Time

Since his departure from the White House and his failure to launch a European-wide populist movement, Bannon has fallen from the mainstream media spotlight. This is in no small part due to his indictment on charges of defrauding donors through his We Build the Wall organization. While continuing to deal with these legal troubles, Bannon also hosts a podcast called Steve Bannon’s War Room where he takes on the persona of a right-wing radio host, commenting on the daily headlines, promoting anti-vaccine theories, and putting forward political conspiracies about the 2020 US presidential election.[2] Despite this, attention to Bannon’s political theology of Traditionalism remains necessary as the forces that gave rise to Trump and made a space for someone like Bannon to gain proximity to power have not gone away. Trump’s decisive win in the 2024 Iowa caucuses is just one indicator that these forces remain potent. It is perhaps an overstatement to claim that Bannon himself is a full-fledged Traditionalist. Yet, in his political decisions, his documentaries, and his speeches, there is clear evidence that he finds aspects of the movement appealing and is even willing to implement them within the halls of power. For that reason, it is important that we continue to pay attention to this political theology and those who draw on it.

[1] A close engagement with Guénon’s use of Hindu texts and sources remains beyond the scope of this post. It should be noted, however, that like other Orientalists, he saw the “East” writ large as harboring spiritual resources lost to the west. For a recent, more sympathetic, reappraisal of Guénon’s Orientalist legacy, see Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism: A Critique of Modern Knowledge.

[2] For a compelling analysis of the War Room podcast and the wider media ecosystem in which it operates, see Naomi Klein, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World (2023), esp. chap. 6.

Leave a Comment on The Political Theology of Traditionalism: Steve Bannon, the Far Right, and the End of Days
Joshua S. Lupo
Joshua S. Lupo is the Assistant Director of the Contending Modernities research initiative. In this role, he serves as the editor and writer for the Contending Modernities Blog and the classroom coordinator for the Madrasa Discourses program. He has published articles and reviews in Sophia, Soundings, Critical Muslim, Reading Religion, and Religious Studies Review. With CM Co-Director Atalia Omer, he is the co-editor of Broken Solidarities: Feminism, Race, and Transnationalism (Notre Dame Press, 2022) and Religion, Populism, and Modernity: Confronting White Christian Nationalism and Racism  (Notre Dame Press, 2023). His current book project is titled After Essentialism: A Critical Phenomenology for the Study of Religion.
Theorizing Modernities article

Can “the Ghosts of Religion Past” Rest in Peace? The Churches and Alternative Futures on the Island of Ireland


Inchigeelagh Church and Cemetary. Image credit: Flikr User Mark Leary. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 DEED.

More than a quarter-century after the Good Friday peace agreement, Northern Ireland remains divided along sectarian lines. In Belfast, imposing “peace walls” continue to cast long shadows, preventing interaction between one side and the other. Gardens of remembrance and murals are located near or even on the walls. Some sites memorialize paramilitaries, grieving and glorifying the dead. Others sacralize violence: in Protestant areas, the slogan “For God and Ulster” dominates; in Catholic areas, hunger strikers are depicted as Christ-like martyrs, laying down their lives for others.

Catherine Corless’ history of the Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home in Tuam, Co Galway, published in 2012, exposed the burial of 796 infants in a septic tank, their graves unmarked. More than a decade later, local people have adorned the site with memorials: a list of names, a plaque, photographs, baby shoes, and teddies.

The tragic and unnecessary deaths that took place during the Troubles and in the island’s church-run institutions may at first seem unrelated. Yet they can be linked to the churches’ historic pursuit of power, which resulted in the sins of sectarianism and cultures of abuse. Belfast’s peace walls and the grounds of Tuam’s Mother and Baby Home are just some of the many spaces and places where the ghosts of the island’s Christian past haunt the present and in doing so make demands on the future.

The churches, of course, are not solely responsible for these tragedies. And since the middle of the twentieth century, the churches’ social and political power has waned. But the churches can still address their own legacies and in that way contribute to alternative futures which include healing rather than (or, perhaps more realistically, alongside) pain.

Hauntings: The Ghosts of Religion Past

“Hauntings” and “ghosts” are not topics usually considered by social scientists, but they have gained traction as social scientific concepts in recent decades. Jacques Derrida’s 1994 Specters of Marx can be considered a starting point. 

Building on Derrida, conceptions of hauntings alert us that, first, it is impossible to forget or suppress the past. Memories of traumas work their way into the present through anniversaries of atrocities, the recovery of the bones of the dead, the intergenerational transmission of violent patterns of relating, and so on.  

Second, social scientific conceptions of hauntings are focused on justice, with the ghosts urging their descendants to right the wrongs of the past. As Avery Gordon insists: “To be haunted in the name of a will to heal is to allow the ghost to help you imagine what was lost that never even existed, really. … [it is] to long for the insight … that it could have been and can be otherwise” (57).

So, we can ask of the churches’ roles on the island of Ireland: What could have been and can be otherwise? But first, we must explore the churches’ sins.

Sins: Sectarianism and Cultures of Abuse

Sectarianism pre-dates the partition of the island in 1921, having become embedded during post-Reformation periods of “plantation” (or colonization). Over centuries, the churches contributed to processes that not only produced enmity between people of different Christian traditions, but created social, political, and economic structures that divided people and favored some over others across the entire island. 

It is understandable that sectarianism is often reduced to a northern phenomenon, given the relationship between sectarianism and the violence of the Troubles. Despite reforms that have reduced inequalities and the introduction of power-sharing in the Northern Ireland Assembly, the legacies of sectarianism persist in continued segregation along “religious” lines in schools, neighbourhoods, and marriage patterns; prejudicial attitudes; and inter-generational trauma. Yet, as I have shown elsewhere, in the south religious segregation also exists (albeit to a more limited extent), and despite its recent fall from grace, the Catholic Church continues to hold a privileged cultural and societal position, including in its role in education, cultural rites of passage, and healthcare.

A culture of abuse is most closely associated with the southern state, the Republic of Ireland. The term “culture of abuse” emphasizes that the widespread abuse of women and children (and some men) in the churches—especially the Catholic Church—cannot be reduced to the acts of individual perpetrators. Derek Scally’s The Best Catholics in the World explores how state and society enthusiastically embraced Catholicism as integral to its identity, then pursued policies that promoted a self-image of a holy, Catholic Ireland. This was, in some ways, a response to the centuries-long experience of colonization by an aggressively Protestant (and anti-Catholic) British state.

After independence, the southern state granted the Catholic Church far-reaching control in education and health, and Catholic social teachings were reflected in law. Those who did not conform to this pious self-image were institutionalized in Magdalene Laundries, Mother and Baby Homes, or industrial schools. In these institutions the inmates (and yes, this is the most accurate term) endured forced labour and other forms of physical and emotional abuse. At the same time, the all-island structures of the churches, which pre-date partition, remind us that cultures of abuse were island-wide. In addition, the British state (of which Northern Ireland is officially a part) abdicated some responsibilities to churches in education, health, and care, facilitating abuses of power.

We return, then, to Gordon’s question: What could have been and can be otherwise? What would have happened had the island’s churches resisted the temptation to align themselves with political power in their quest to secure societal influence through rigid compliance? What if the churches had chosen loving service? In the twenty-first century, the island’s churches have, at least haltingly, begun to reckon with their sins of sectarianism and abuse.

Apologies: Addressing the Ghosts?

In 2021, the Church Leaders’ Group released a St Patrick’s Day video message. Noting the centenary of the partition of the island and creation of Northern Ireland, the message advocated reflection on the past as a basis for building a better future. 

The Church Leaders’ Group consists of the Catholic and Church of Ireland Archbishops of Armagh, the Presbyterian Moderator, and the Presidents of the Methodist Church and the Irish Council of Churches. As I’ve discussed, during the video, Catholic Archbishop Eamon Martin delivered the churches’ most comprehensive confession ever for their historic contributions to division and violence:

As Christian churches we acknowledge and lament the times that we failed to bring to a fearful and divided society that message of deeper connection that binds us, despite our different identities, as children of God, made in His image and likeness. We have often been captive churches; not captive to the Word of God, but to the idols of state and nation.

Since then, these church leaders have offered further apologies and publicly declared that the churches are willing to facilitate efforts to “deal with the past.” We might conclude that the churches, or at least these leaders, have begun to heed the ghosts’ pleas for justice. Yet these apologies have not captured the public imagination in the way they might have had they come several decades earlier, when the churches had more influence.

Apologies for abuse have received more public attention. But these apologies have been ineffective because of the words chosen by leaders when delivering them. In 2010 Cardinal Seán Brady apologized for “hurt” caused by “any failure on my part”—avoiding the acceptance of responsibility (8). Similarly, Cardinal Desmond Connell deflected responsibility in his apology after the 2009 Murphy Report into abuses in the Dublin archdiocese. 

There have been five official state apologies for historical abuse in church-run institutions. They have been better received than apologies by church leaders. This may be because the state has implemented some measures for redress. Religious orders have paid just €128 million of the €1.5 billion in compensation (102). 

James Gallen argues that apologies on their own are not enough to deal with the legacy of the past, functioning only “as episodic forms of power” for victims/survivors and failing to address “broader structural, epistemic, and ontological forms of power” (223). Likewise, John Brewer claims that people cannot “remember forwards” in a positive way unless “social betterment and improvement help break the haunting hold that the past has over the future” (42).

How, then, might the island’s churches break that haunting hold and put their own ghosts to rest?

Alternative Futures

I want to suggest two ways the churches might move on from apology and construct alternative futures: theology and witness. The first, theology, could start with the island’s best-known theologian of the twentieth century, Enda McDonagh, who was influenced by liberation theology, including its post-colonial context. Other theologians have articulated theologies of reconciliation, including David Tombs, Leah Robinson, Siobhan Garrigan, and Maria Power. Tombs has also explored theologies of trauma and abuse. The public theology of Methodist Johnston McMaster has been significant for its critiques of churches’ abuses of power.

There are also strong foundations for pursuing the second way: witness. Witnesses against violence and injustice—usually individuals and small groups—were present in the churches’ past. Their work has been documented in academic studies and biographies and memoirs of clergy who contributed to peacebuilding. Some victim-survivors of abuse, such as Marie Collins, retain their Christian identities and can be considered witnesses to what could have been and can be otherwise. 

The churches may struggle to incorporate these challenging witnesses into their own stories as institutions, given that their very witness critiques those institutions. But it is the stories of these people that could inspire younger generations to focus on justice, reforming the churches from within. This would require that the churches acknowledge and celebrate these witnesses, and perhaps even facilitate mentoring relationships between aging witnesses and younger Christians. For it will only be through the flesh-and-blood bodies of the next generation that visions for what can be otherwise will be lived out, animated by the witness of those who went before and by fresh theologies that through the pursuit of justice, put the ghosts of the past to rest.

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Gladys Ganiel
Gladys Ganiel is Professor in Sociology at Queen’s University Belfast. Her
specializations are religion and conflict in Northern Ireland, religion on the island of Ireland, evangelicalism, and the emerging church. She has published six authored/co-authored books and more than 50 articles and chapters, including The Deconstructed Church: Understanding Emerging Christianity (Oxford 2014), co-authored with Gerardo Marti, Transforming Post-Catholic Ireland (Oxford 2016), and Evangelicalism and Conflict in Northern Ireland (Palgrave 2008). She is co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Religion in Modern Ireland (Oxford 2024).  She is currently researching “Religion in Societies Emerging from Covid-19,” a Trans-Atlantic Platform partnership with Montreal, Bremen, and Warsaw, funded by the AHRC.
Global Currents article

Hear, O Israel!: An Open Address to the Jewish Mainstream


Jewish Italian writer Primo Levi (1919–1987) in his later years. Photo Via Wikimedia Commons.

To us, we Jews who live safe in our warm houses, consider:

On October 7, 2023, when unspeakable acts of brutality were carried out in southern Israel, our political differences, for the most part, melted away and we reacted with horror and shock. We mourned the victims, wept with the bereaved, and shuddered at the thought of the terror and dread felt by those who were taken captive. We were filled with outrage against the perpetrators. What sort of people would we be if we had not reacted this way? If we had muttered “it’s so tragic” or “how awful,” and left it at that?

But that is how many of us, if not most, respond to the unspeakable suffering and loss experienced by the people of Gaza at the hands of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). We read that over 90% of the population has been forcibly displaced from their homes, with nowhere to go. We see images of total devastation on a gigantic scale. We hear reports of masses of people with little or no food or water; of horrendous injuries and countless deaths caused by relentless Israeli bombardment. And what do we do? We shake our heads solemnly, uttering phrases like “yes, it’s dreadful,” and then quickly move on. The right of Israel to defend itself is blithely invoked. One way or the other, we do not look the victims in the eye.

“You who live safe / in your warm houses, / You who find, returning in the evening, / Hot food and friendly faces: / Consider if this is a man / Who works in the mud/ Who does not know peace / Who fights for a scrap of bread …” “Consider if this is a woman, / Without hair and without name / With no more strength to remember, / Her eyes empty and her womb cold / Like a frog in winter.” These lines are from “Shema” (“Hear”), the poem Primo Levi wrote shortly after being liberated from Auschwitz.

Consider: Levi’s lines tell us that the abject beings he describes are human individuals. He tells us nothing more about them. Nothing about their identity or where they come from. He speaks only of what they have been reduced to in the camps: something less than what they are: a woman and a man. It’s as if there is nothing more we need to know. As if this were the essence of what he wants us to hear.

What he wants us to hear is timeless. So, reflecting on the wasteland called Gaza: Consider if this is a child, who sits amid the ruins of his home, who is inconsolable with grief at the death of his parents, who fights for a scrap of bread. Consider if this is a mother, robbed of her slain daughters and sons, with no more strength to bear her unborn baby, her face wracked with pain and loss.

“Meditate that this came about,” Levi writes in “Shema,” after his harrowing description of the man and the woman stripped of their humanity. “I commend these words to you. / Carve them in your hearts/ At home, in the street, / Going to bed, rising …” Perhaps you notice that these lines inflect the text of the biblical Shema, the summons “Hear, O Israel!,” after which his poem is named. If, confronted with the hell unleashed on the people of Gaza in our name, we could do as Levi says, and carve his words in our hearts, then we would not efface the humanity of the children, women, and men of Gaza. Then our hearts would be broken. We would not rush to justify what Israel is doing, day after day after day, to this people. We might instead exclaim: “Hear, O Israel!”

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Brian Klug
Brian Klug is Hon. Fellow in Social Philosophy at Campion Hall, University of Oxford; Hon. Fellow of the Parkes Institute for the Study of Jewish/non-Jewish Relations, University of Southampton; and Fellow of the College of Arts & Sciences, St Xavier University, Chicago. He is an Associate Editor of Patterns of Prejudice and a member of the Boards for “Negotiating Jewish Identity: Jewish Life in 21st Century Norway” (The Norwegian Center for Holocaust and Minority Studies), Islamophobia Studies Yearbook, and ReOrient: The Journal of Critical Muslim Studies. His books include A Time to Speak Out: Independent Jewish Voices on Israel, Zionism and Jewish Identity (2008, co-editor); Offence: the Jewish Case (2009); Being Jewish and Doing Justice: Bringing Argument to Life (2011); and Words of Fire: Selected Essays of Ahad Ha’am (2015, editor). He took part in The Vienna Conversations (Bruno Kreisky Forum) and was one of the drafters of the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism (2021).
Global Currents article

George Orwell, Gaza, and “The Debasement of Language”


Palestinians inspect the damage following an Israeli airstrike on the El-Remal aera in Gaza City on October 9, 2023. Israel continued to battle Hamas fighters on October 10 and massed tens of thousands of troops and heavy armour around the Gaza Strip after vowing a massive blow over the Palestinian militants’ surprise attack. Photo by Naaman Omar, apaimages, via Wikimedia Commons.

“Political language … is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” George Orwell wrote these words, which come at the end of his essay “Politics and the English Language,” in 1946. He could be writing them from the grave today and thinking of ways in which language is being used in the context of the so-called “Israel-Gaza war.” “In our time,” Orwell says, “political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible.” He is not alluding to falsehoods or fallacies, but to words and phrases that keep us from the facts, or from the effect the facts would otherwise have on us. His essay is about “debased language”: language that defends the indefensible by preventing us from thinking.

Day after day, as Israel has laid waste to Gaza, unspeakable atrocities have been spoken about in language that robs them of their horror. Israel’s relentless devastation of Gaza, the destruction of 40% of homes in the strip (at the time of writing), as well as hospitals and infrastructure, the blockade on fuel and electricity and other vital services, the killing, the maiming, the terrorizing, the aerial bombardment that has wiped out entire families, the mass displacement of 1.9 million people (at the time of writing), all this is indescribable.

Sometimes it is better to be lost for words. Perhaps we should remember this more often. Perhaps we should hold our tongue until we find words that approximate to reality—the brutal human reality of suffering, grief, loss, and despair. This means suppressing the impulse to appropriate the facts for our agendas, or resisting the urge to smother those facts with words that cushion their impact, euphemisms that soften their blow. Sometimes we should just stand open-mouthed, without a political analysis falling fully formed from our lips. There are times when we need to stop talking in order to start thinking—thinking politically. Now is such a time.

Sometimes it is better to be lost for words. . .  . Perhaps we should hold our tongue until we find words that approximate to reality—the brutal human reality of suffering, grief, loss and despair.

Orwell writes in his essay: “As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed …” Phrases do not have to be around for long in order to become hackneyed. A turn of speech can turn into a cliché almost overnight, provided there is a sufficient incentive. People will latch onto it with alacrity if it helps to conceal an inconvenient truth or to take cover from the implications of their own unbearable position. Take, for example, “humanitarian pause,” a phrase that has become a commonplace in the last couple of months. There has, so far, been one temporary ceasefire, which was towards the end of November 2023. But Israel could not be clearer about its intentions: to continue to lay waste to Gaza. And that is just what they have done, blasting whole neighborhoods to smithereens. Yet there are calls for more “humanitarian pauses.” How reassuring the word “humanitarian” is! But whom does it console: the people of Gaza or the people who utter the phrase? Sara Roy asks: “What does a pause mean in the middle of such carnage? Does it mean feeding people so they can survive to be killed the next day? How is that humanitarian? How is that humane?” But critiquing a mindless mantra or a hackneyed turn of speech is a thankless task. The repetition of the phrase “humanitarian pause” is like a lullaby, and the debate around it is a form of sleep-talking.

Sleep-talking can also take the form of stringing together stock items of vocabulary, “ready-made phrases,” as Orwell calls them, letting them “construct your sentences for you – even think your thoughts for you.” Or, to put it differently, they make the act of thinking passive. They do this according to a kind of algorithm, dictated by a political ideology or program. “It is at this point,” Orwell observes, “that the special connexion between politics and the debasement of language becomes clear.” What could be more debased than a jargon that turns barbarism into justice, atrocity into progress, so as to get the facts to fit a preconceived frame? Consider this set of facts about the actions of Hamas or its allies during its incursion into southern Israel on October 7, 2023: around 1,200 people killed in “more than 20 different locations”; in kibbutz Be’eri alone, “at least 100 people slaughtered … dragged from their homes and murdered”; women “raped before they were shot”; over 200 people abducted as hostages, “including infants, children, and elderly people.” Here is how these horrific facts were reflected in the banner headline of a “progressive” newspaper two days later: “Rejoice as Palestinian resistance humiliates racist Israel.”  In this headline, the horrific is turned into the heroic at a stroke. By a kind of verbal alchemy, civilian victims of the crimes committed on October 7th become mere tokens of a state: personifications of Israel, not persons in their own right. It is the Israeli state (“racist Israel”) that was raped, not individual women; the state that was murdered and abducted, not infants or children or the elderly. Similarly, an eminent Israeli historian, but coming to the defense of Israel, declared : “On 7 October Israel [itself] was raped  …” You could say this is hyperbole, but it amounts to theft: stealing the ordeal of rape from the women who experienced it and transferring it to a theoretical entity, the state. To recall Orwell’s words: “the concrete melts into the abstract.” In the banner headline that I have quoted, the flesh-and-blood victims of horrendous acts are erased by a phrase “racist Israel.” Even Israel is not the ultimate villain or target, as the subhead, via a dubious historical comparison, explains: “Like the Tet Offensive in Vietnam in 1968, the Palestinians’ surprise attack has humbled imperialism.” Jargon (“imperialism”) has the last word.

The repetition of the phrase “humanitarian pause” is like a lullaby, and the debate around it is a form of sleep-talking.

Moreover, in these two sentences (the headline and the subhead), Hamas’s onslaught is referred to as “Palestinian resistance,” regardless of whether or not this is how Palestinians themselves see it. The synonymy is assumed. But this is a matter for Palestinians themselves to debate and to decide, not something for a person or group in faraway Britain to decree. In this scheme of things, however, Palestinians do not count in their own right, any more than Israelis do. They count only as representatives of (to quote another phrase from the article) “the oppressed.” It is quite an achievement to write an article about the strife between Palestinians and Israelis in which Israelis and Palestinians come into the picture only as stand-ins for “oppressor” and “oppressed.” This article—and there are many others like it—is a helpful demonstration of how “the debasement of language” degrades political thinking. For thinking is not political unless it is grounded, and it is not grounded when, to quote Orwell again, “the concrete melts into the abstract.”

In the passage in which Orwell talks about “the defence of the indefensible,” he immediately illustrates the point with a scenario that is uncannily recognizable. “Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside … the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification.” Substitute “Israel’s right to defend itself” for “pacification” (and maybe “tents” for “huts”), and the picture corresponds to the here and now. Perhaps he really is writing from the grave.

True, President Joe Biden, Prime Minister Rushi Sunak, and other world leaders who assert Israel’s right to defend itself, add that Israel should act within international humanitarian law (or “the laws of war”). But add is the operative word. The emphasis falls repeatedly on the former, giving the clear impression that the right of the state has priority over the human rights of the Palestinian population of Gaza: “Israel has the right, but…” The “but” is an echo of the refrain, “We stand with Israel,” which Biden and Sunak and other world leaders have declared from the start. (Or, as Sunak said, shaking hands with Netanyahu in Jerusalem, “We want you to win.”) The sound of the refrain, like background noise, never fades, even if we are not aware of hearing it. This too is how speech can confuse and mislead. Language is an instrument. And Biden, Sunak, and the others, are like a collective Nero, fiddling while Gaza burns.

What language can prevent, language can promote: thinking politically. This requires using words that bridge the gap between the concrete and the abstract, without either flinching from the facts or appropriating them for the sake of a cherished theory or agenda. Only thus can we broach the most political of questions, not least for Palestinians and Israelis: how to share the common spaces we inhabit, so as to advance the common good. This, apart from the diagnoses of linguistic malpractices, is what I take from Orwell’s essay—a prophetic blast from the past, which speaks powerfully to us in the present abysmal moment.

3 Comments on George Orwell, Gaza, and “The Debasement of Language”
Brian Klug
Brian Klug is Hon. Fellow in Social Philosophy at Campion Hall, University of Oxford; Hon. Fellow of the Parkes Institute for the Study of Jewish/non-Jewish Relations, University of Southampton; and Fellow of the College of Arts & Sciences, St Xavier University, Chicago. He is an Associate Editor of Patterns of Prejudice and a member of the Boards for “Negotiating Jewish Identity: Jewish Life in 21st Century Norway” (The Norwegian Center for Holocaust and Minority Studies), Islamophobia Studies Yearbook, and ReOrient: The Journal of Critical Muslim Studies. His books include A Time to Speak Out: Independent Jewish Voices on Israel, Zionism and Jewish Identity (2008, co-editor); Offence: the Jewish Case (2009); Being Jewish and Doing Justice: Bringing Argument to Life (2011); and Words of Fire: Selected Essays of Ahad Ha’am (2015, editor). He took part in The Vienna Conversations (Bruno Kreisky Forum) and was one of the drafters of the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism (2021).
Theorizing Modernities article

Bibles as Potent Objects in the Political Arena


Image of bibles on a shelf. By Megan, Flickr.com, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 DEED
Image credit: Megan, Flickr.com, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 DEED

Bibles are particularly charged objects, both in terms of the feelings they arouse and in their capacities to act and be acted upon. Bibles are held up in the hands of priests and rabbis. They are paraded, kissed, gently carried, or heavily highlighted. Bibles evoke feelings of anger at the way they have been used to oppress; nostalgia for different times; indifference as they gather dust on shelves. They are concrete artifacts, whether we are talking about the specific canons of faith communities, the manuscripts studied by scholars, or the versions marketed for teenagers and soldiers. 

Though most readily thought of as the possession of faith communities, Bibles are potent objects in the political arena. Bits of biblical text feature on placards, in speeches and debates. In book form, Bibles are pounded, sworn on, or brandished before a crowd. The image of Donald Trump holding up a Bible in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church in Washington D.C. in June 2020, after law enforcement officers forcefully targeted peaceful protesters in Lafayette Square, quickly went viral. Other forms of political Bible-use are more humorous and subversive, like the Tory-Jesus memes circulating on social media. 

The politics and potency of Bibles has long been recognized in the formation of modern nation-states. In the wake of the Protestant Reformation, versions of scripture in vernacular languages became important for understandings of peoplehood through the prism of national culture and identity. National Bibles continue to be hailed as foundations for the nation-state. Around the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible in the UK in 2011, then Conservative prime minister David Cameron pontificated that this Bible is a key source for the modern British nation, its language and politics. 

Political uses of Bibles work because they are thick with association. In The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Sara Ahmed discusses the way texts generate effects. Texts, particularly classics and canonical texts, are stuck to histories of association. Yet the way these associations orbit a text and make it thick with what Ahmed calls “affective value” is often concealed.  Ahmed talks about the effects of repetition, but also of the concealment of the work of this repetition. Associations become thick from the ideas and histories that are stuck to Bibles and particular biblical texts. But the ways that Bibles and bits of Bible are perceived and handled are also a matter, as Karen Bray and Stephen Moore have contended, of how they feel. 

Recently, as I have shown elsewhere, the British far-right movement Britain First has made use of biblical verses as forms of greeting on social media. On December 27, 2021, for instance, Philippians 4:13 was shared on their official Telegram account: “I can do all things through Christ, who strengthens me,” followed by the message: “HAVE A GREAT DAY FELLOW CHRISTIAN PATRIOTS…” The image the text is set against is a blue sky with the indication of a cloud. A few days later, December 29, Psalm 139:23, “Search me, God, and know my heart. Try me, and know my thoughts,” was shared over a dark background with leaves in the top corners of the image. Multiple other biblical verses are shared by Britain First in this style and format. 

Led by the former British National Party councillor Paul Golding, Britain First emerged in 2011 with distinctly nationalist, authoritarian, nativist, ethnocentric, and xenophobic tendencies. They claim to defend the “indigenous” British people by opposing immigration. Like other contemporary manifestations of the Far Right, Britain First repeatedly speaks of Islam as a threatening enemy, calling for “Islamification” to be resisted. Acting in part like a political party and in part more like a street-level protest movement, Golding has been charged on several occasions for publishing hateful material and for threatening and abusive behavior. While Britain First might not be deemed particularly successful, they have capitalized on the use of social media and have built up significant audiences online.

The sharing of biblical texts seems to have been instigated by Paul Golding on October 16, 2020, when he shared an image of a Bible on their official Telegram channel, and commented: “Just purchased myself a brand-new Bible. At a minimum, I’d suggest to other Christians to read at least one Proverb per day. Nourishment for the soul!” 

In some ways the Bible posts of Britain First are not surprising. Britain First has written openly about Christianity in the ideology section of the official webpage (the webpage has since been revised). It describes Britain as a “solidly Christian nation,” and state that “[o]ur political and legal system was born out of the framework of laws and morals contained in the Holy Bible.” It further states:

Britain First is committed to preserving our British cultural heritage, traditions, customs and values. We oppose the increasing colonisation of our homeland through uncontrolled, mass immigration. Britain First is committed to maintaining and strengthening Christianity as the foundation of our society and culture. 

The Bible-posts by Britain First can be understood as part of the history of using Christian scripture to perform national identity. I argue that the kind of Bible that features in the social media posts of Britain First is supposed to feel good, not necessarily as textual content but as a source of national sentiment that feeds on national and cultural pride in an anti-Islamic Christian “us.” Despite appearing negligent and benign, then, the Bible-use of Britain First is evidence of the potency of scripture in the political arena, particularly as an affective archive tied to the nation.

It is imperative to understand these daily Bible-posts within broader European far-right tendencies to invoke religion to emphasize essential differences in order to mask the racist division of people into native insiders and foreign outsiders. What contemporary far-right groups across Europe share is an anti-Muslim stance, frequently propped up by a defense of Christian identity and culture. Golding’s allegedly brand-new Bible was a King James version. In the history of creating national—often state-sponsored and state-sanctioned—Bibles in the vernacular, these Bibles can be seen as majoritarian artifacts made accessible for the people of a nation. National Bibles can be treasured books by a majority of the population without that requiring that they necessarily be exclusive or exclusionary. But national Bibles can function, as Marianne Kartzow Bjelland and Karin Neutel have argued, to defend and protect a majoritarian “we” in the face of a changing religious landscape that either implicitly or explicitly excludes minorities from the “we” in the public sphere. Expressing the need to protect the Christian nation and peppering their social media with daily Bible-posts can be a way for Britain First of fostering the “we” that are imagined as native to Britain. 

Britain First is not peculiar in this way. In fact, beyond the nation-state, the Bible has long been celebrated as a foundation for “western civilization”. As Jonathan Sheehan has so persuasively shown, the Enlightenment period in Europe produced a dominant conception of the Bible as an icon of cultural heritage in the West. Sheehan suggests that the near-universal admittance of the cultural relevance of the Bible today—from academics to jurists, from the devout to doubters—is a sign of the prevalence of this Enlightenment legacy. Scholars have demonstrated how the idea of the Bible as a foundation for western culture has fuelled the belief that the Bible is inherently more democratic than the Qur’an, thus becoming a mode of articulating cultural superiority. 

The style and format of the Bible-posts are not insignificant. Britain First presents a bite-size Bible as easily shareable content on social media, made up of short verses against an innocuously pretty image. These posts fit into recent social media trends when it comes to “feel-good” content. Peter Phillips has characterized this shift from propositional content to the therapeutic, to fit the therapeutically inclined ethos of social media. Scholars have discussed the exponential growth of “bite-size” content on social media. Much of this bite-size content is centred on positive thinking in the shape of inspirational quotes and memes, aphorisms, or motivational mottos that are superimposed on an aesthetically pleasing image. Tom de Bruin comments on the way biblical verses and bits of text are frequently superimposed on images and shared online; this does not necessarily reflect a preoccupation with religion or theology, but are signs of the “continuing value of the Bible as cultural object” (145). “The addition of images primes the audience to receive the text in a certain way” and this impacts the particular affective impact of the bite-size Bible (149). 

We might understand the clouds, mountains, and leafy backgrounds to the biblical verses shared by Britain First as a way of packaging the Bible as a benign product. Considering the way right-wing populist and far-right movements (including Britain First) continuously present Islam as threatening, the Qur’an as dangerous, and Muslims as criminals and terrorists, the Bible becomes a point of pride and source of positivity for the Christian nations that purportedly need defending. The benign Bible imagery is problematic in that it masks violent biblical content and racist deployments of the Bible. It adds to a cultural amnesia of the biblical archive as anything but edifice and source of slogans for nations and civilizations. The sharper edges of critique and calls for justice that are part of historical and contemporary Bible-use should not be forgotten. Focusing on the enslaved Egyptian figure of Hagar, Nyasha Junior, for instance, has demonstrated how Black Hagar has been imagined by African-Americans, feminists, and womanists to counter perceptions of a White Bible. Yvonne Sherwood has disrupted bland references of the “Abrahamic” that serve to bolster the biblical foundations of the western world by speaking instead of the “Hagaramic”. As Sherwood puts it, in the context of “the ever more militant policing of European and American borders and identities, the Hagaramic evokes all the sans-papiers, Gastarbeiters, and ‘immigrant’ (?) religions, suing for citizenship and status” (466).

For a group such as Britain First, sharing innocuous Bible-posts can be a way of posing as culturally respectable, while simultaneously linking followers to more extreme content. Scholars have studied the way Britain First used its Facebook page in this way to include Islamophobic content side by side with posts about the British royal family, or photos of cats and castles. The sharing of biblical verses on social media, then, should be seen as part of the attempt to hold up Islam as other in relation to a Christian English nation.  In the case of Britain First, the packaging of the Bible as feel-good mottos and benign daily greetings on aesthetically pleasing backgrounds stands in stark contrast with a persistent fear-mongering about a threatening and violent Islam. The potency of the Bible in the political arena is capitalized on to affectively stir up pride in a Christian nation while simultaneously stirring up hatred and fear of what is excluded from this Christian nation. As such, this Bible-use continues the pernicious clash of cultures discourse that has become so pervasive in Europe. These are not the only capacities Bibles have to affect and be affected, though. Bibles, biblical figures and stories have been used also to engender solidarity, disrupt borders, prompt compassion, and reimagine justice in ways that are anything but benign or innocuous.

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Hannah M. Strømmen
Hannah M. Strømmen is a biblical scholar working at Lund University in Sweden. Her scholarly passions are focused on uses and interpretations of the Bible in philosophy, literature and politics. Currently a Wallenberg Academy Fellow, she leads the “Scripture and Secularism” project, which is a reception history inquiry into the way biblical texts are interpreted as sources for the secular and the way biblical texts continue to circulate in so-called secular spaces. Her first book was Biblical Animality after Jacques Derrida (SBL Press, 2018), which examined how distinctions between gods, humans, and animals are constructed in and by way of the biblical archive. Over the last years she has been working on the Bible and the European far right. Her latest monograph, co-written with Ulrich Schmiedel, is The Claim to Christianity: Responding to the Far Right (SCM Press, 2020).
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Statement of Scholars in Holocaust and Genocide Studies on Mass Violence in Israel and Palestine since 7 October


Protest in Columbus, Ohio, USA, against catastrophic Israeli attacks on Gaza after the 7th of October, 2023.
“Bombing Kids Is Not Self Defense” by Becker1999, Flickr.com, CC BY 2.0 DEED.

In the following statement, over 55 scholars of the Holocaust, genocide, and mass violence deplore the atrocity crimes against civilians committed by Hamas and Islamic Jihad on 7 October and by Israeli forces since then. The starvation, mass killing, and forced displacement of Palestinian civilians in Gaza is ongoing, raising the question of genocide, especially in view of the intentions expressed by Israeli leaders. Israeli President Isaac Herzog used particularly loaded language in an interview on MSNBC just a few days ago, on 5 December: “This war is a war that is not only between Israel and Hamas. It’s a war that is intended, really, truly, to save western civilization. …  We are attacked by [a] Jihadist network, an empire of evil. … and this empire wants to conquer the entire Middle East, and if it weren’t for us, Europe would be next, and the United States follows.” Herzog builds on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s association of Israel’s attack on Gaza with the Biblical evil of Amalek, but he places it on a modern scale as the last stand against global apocalypse and the demise of “western civilization.” Both Herzog and Netanyahu are secular Jews. Their use of religious language and symbolism in this case reflects a dangerous intersection in the case of Israel of the exclusionary modern nation state with a settler colonial project in a place infused with multiple religious histories and meanings. The scholars who have signed the statement are signaling their alarm about the mass violence underway in Gaza and the inflammatory language that threatens to escalate it further. They call for urgent action to stop Israel’s attack on Gaza and to work towards a future that will guarantee the equality, freedom, dignity, and security of all the people who live between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.

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Statement of Scholars in Holocaust and Genocide Studies on Mass Violence in Israel and Palestine since 7 October

December 9, 2023

We, scholars of the Holocaust, genocide, and mass violence, feel compelled to warn of the danger of genocide in Israel’s attack on Gaza. We also note that, should the Israeli attack continue and escalate, Palestinians under Israeli military occupation in the West Bank and East Jerusalem and Palestinian citizens of Israel face grave danger as well.

We are deeply saddened and concerned by the mass murder of over 1,200 Israelis and migrant workers by Hamas, the Islamic Jihad, and others on 7 October, with more than 830 civilians among them. We also note the evidence of gender-based and sexual violence during the attack, the wounding of thousands of Israelis, the destruction of Israeli kibbutzim and towns, and the abduction of more than 240 hostages into the Gaza Strip. These acts constitute war crimes and crimes against humanity. We recognize that violence in Israel and Palestine did not begin on 7 October. If we are to try to understand the mass murder of 7 October, we should place it within the context of Israeli settler colonialism, Israeli military occupation violence against Palestinians since 1967, the sixteen-year siege on the Gaza Strip since 2007, and the rise to power in Israel in the last year of a government made up of politicians who speak proudly about Jewish supremacy and exclusionary nationalism. Explaining is not justifying, and this context in no way excuses the targeting of Israeli civilians and migrant workers by Palestinians on 7 October.

We are also deeply saddened and concerned by the Israeli attack on Gaza in response to the Hamas attack. Israel’s assault has caused death and destruction on an unprecedented level, according to a New York Times article on 26 November. In two months, the Israeli assault has killed more than 16,000 Palestinians (with thousands more buried under the rubble)—nearly half of them children and youth, with a Palestinian child killed every ten minutes on average before the ceasefire—and wounded over 40,000. Considering that the total population of Gaza stands at 2.3 million people, the killing rate so far is about 0.7 percent in less than two months. The killing rate of civilians in Russia’s bombing and invasion of Ukraine in the areas most affected by the violence are probably similar—but over a longer period of time. A number of experts have therefore described Israel’s attack on Gaza as the most intense and deadliest of its kind since World War II, but while Russia’s attack on Ukraine has, for very good reason, prompted western leaders to support the people under attack, the same western leaders now support the violence of the Israeli state rather than the Palestinians under attack.

Israel has also forcibly displaced more than 1.8 million Palestinians within the Gaza Strip, while destroying almost half of all buildings and leaving the northern part of the Strip an “uninhabitable moonscape.” Indeed, the Israeli army has dropped more than 25,000 tons of explosives on Gaza since 7 October, which is equivalent to two Hiroshima bombs, and according to Human Rights Watch, deployed white phosphorous bombs. It has systematically targeted hospitals, schools, universities, mosques, churches, bakeries, and agricultural fields. The state has also killed many essential professionals, including more than 220 healthcare workers, over 100 UN personnel, and dozens of journalists. The forced displacement has, furthermore, created in the southern part of the Strip severe overcrowding, with the risk of outbreak of infectious diseases, exacerbated by shortages of food, clean water, fuel, and medical supplies, due to Israel’s “total siege” measures since 7 October.

The unprecedented level of destruction and killing points to large-scale war crimes in Israel’s attack on Gaza. There is also evidence of a “widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population, with knowledge of the attack” that the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court defines as a crime against humanity. Moreover, dozens of statements of Israeli leaders, ministers in the war cabinet, and senior army officers since 7 October—that is, people with command authority—suggest an “intent to destroy” Palestinians “as such,” in the language of the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. The statements include depictions of all Palestinians in Gaza as responsible for the Hamas attack on 7 October and therefore legitimate military targets, as expressed by Israeli President Herzog on 13 October and by Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu when he invoked, on 29 October, the Biblical story of the total destruction of Amalek by the Israelites, just as Israel began its ground invasion. Casting an entire civilian population as enemies marks the history of modern genocide, with the Armenian genocide (1915-1918) and the Rwanda genocide (1994) as well-known examples. The statements also include dehumanizing language, such as Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant’s reference to “human animals” when he proclaimed “total siege” on Gaza on 9 October. The slippage between seeing Hamas as “human animals” to seeing all Palestinians in Gaza in this way is evident in what Israeli Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories Maj. Gen. Ghassan Alian promised to people in Gaza the next day: “Hamas has turned into ISIS, and the residents of Gaza, instead of being appalled, are celebrating. … Human animals must be treated as such. There will be no electricity and no water [in Gaza], there will only be destruction. You wanted hell, you will get hell.”

These expressions of intent need to be understood also in relation to the widespread incitement to genocide in Israeli media since 7 October. Israeli journalist David Mizrachi Wertheim, for instance, wrote on social media on 7 October that “If all the captives are not returned immediately, then turn the [Gaza] Strip into a slaughterhouse. If a hair falls from their head – execute security prisoners. Violate all norms on the way to victory.” He also added, “we are facing human animals.” Four days later, another Israeli journalist, Roy Sharon, commented on social media “that if, in order to finally eliminate the military capabilities of Hamas, including Sinwar and Deif, we need a million bodies, then let there be a million bodies.” Annihilatory language now also appears in public spaces, such as banners on bridges in Tel Aviv that call “to annihilate Gaza” and explain that “the picture of triumph is 0 people in Gaza.” There are dozens of examples of incitement in Israeli media, which recalls the incitement to genocide in Rwanda as genocide was unfolding there in 1994.

This incitement points to the grave danger that Palestinians everywhere under Israeli rule now face. Israeli army and settler violence in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, which has intensified markedly from the beginning of 2023, has entered a new stage of brutality after 7 October. Sixteen Palestinian communities—over a thousand people—have been forcibly displaced in their entirety, continuing the policy of “ethnic cleansing” in Area C that comprises 60 percent of the West Bank. Israeli soldiers and settlers have furthermore killed more than 220 Palestinians in the West Bank since 7 October, while arresting thousands. The violence against Palestinians also includes acts of torture.

Palestinian citizens of Israel—almost 2 million people—are also facing a state assault against them, with hundreds of arrests since 7 October for any expression of identification with Palestinians in Gaza. There is widespread intimidation and silencing of Palestinian students, faculty, and staff in Israeli universities, and the Israeli Police Commissioner Kobi Shabtai threatened to expel to Gaza Israeli Palestinians identifying with Palestinians in Gaza. These alarming developments and measures build on a view of Palestinian citizens of Israel as potential enemies that stretches back to the military rule imposed on the 156,000 Palestinians who survived the Nakba and remained within the territory that became Israel in 1948. This iteration of military rule lasted until 1966, but the image of Israeli Palestinians as a threat has persisted. In May 2021, as many Israeli Palestinians came out to protest an attack on Palestinians in East Jerusalem and another attack on Gaza, the Israeli police responded with massive repression and violence, arresting hundreds. The situation deteriorated quickly, as Jewish and Palestinian citizens clashed across Israel—in some places, as in Haifa, with Jewish citizens attacking Palestinian citizens on the streets and breaking into houses of Palestinian citizens. And now, Itamar Ben-Gvir, the far-right settler who serves as Israeli minister of national security, has put Israeli Palestinians in even more danger by the distribution of thousands of weapons to Israeli civilians who have formed hundreds of self-defense units after 7 October.

The escalating violence against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and the exclusion and violence against Palestinian citizens of Israel are particularly worrying in the context of calls in Israel after 7 October for a “second Nakba.” The reference is to the massacres and “ethnic cleansing” of more than 750,000 Palestinians and the destruction of hundreds of villages and towns by Israeli forces in the 1948 war, when Israel was established. The language that member of the Israeli Knesset (parliament) Ariel Kallner from the ruling Likud party used in a social media post on 7 October is instructive: “Nakba to the enemy now. … Now, only one goal: Nakba! Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of 1948. Nakba in Gaza and Nakba to whoever dares to join [them].” We know that genocide is a process, and we recognize that the stage is thus set for violence more severe than the Nakba and not spatially limited to Gaza.

Thus, the time for concerted action to prevent genocide is now. We call on governments to uphold their legal obligations under the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide to intervene and prevent genocide (Article 1) by (1) implementing an arms embargo on Israel; (2) working to end Israel’s military assault on Gaza; (3) pressuring the Israeli government to stop immediately the intensifying army and settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, which constitute clear violations of international law; (4) demanding the continued release of all hostages held in Gaza and all Palestinians imprisoned unlawfully in Israel, without charges or trial; (5) calling on the International Criminal Court to investigate and issue arrest warrants against all perpetrators of mass violence on 7 October and since then, both Palestinians and Israelis; and (6) initiating a political process in Israel and Palestine based on a truthful reckoning with Israeli mass violence against Palestinians since the 1948 Nakba and a future that will guarantee the equality, freedom, dignity, and security of all the people who live between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.

We also call on businesses and labor unions to ensure that they do not aid and abet Israeli mass violence, but rather follow the example of workers in Belgium transport unions who refused in late October to handle flights that ship arms to Israel.

Finally, we call on scholars, programs, centers, and institutes in Holocaust and Genocide Studies to take a clear stance against Israeli mass violence and join us in efforts to stop it and prevent its further escalation.

 

 

Mohamed Adhikari, University of Cape Town

Taner Akçam, Director, Armenian Genocide Research Program, The Promise Armenian Institute, UCLA

Ayhan Aktar, Professor of Sociology (Retired), Istanbul Bilgi University

Yassin Al Haj Saleh, Syrian Writer, Berlin

Sebouh David Aslanian, Professor of History and Richard Hovannisian Endowed Chair in Modern Armenian History, UCLA

Karyn Ball, Professor of English and Film Studies, University of Alberta, Edmonton

Haim Bresheeth-Žabner, Professorial Research Associate, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London

Cathie Carmichael, Professor Emerita, School of History, University of East Anglia

Daniele Conversi, Professor, Department of Contemporary History, University of the Basque Country

Catherine Coquio, Professeure de littérature comparée à Université Paris Cité, France

John Cox, Associate Professor of History and Global Studies and Director of the Center for Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights Studies, University of North Carolina, Charlotte

Martin Crook, Senior Lecturer in Sociology, University of the West of England

Ann Curthoys, Honorary Professor, School of Humanities, The University of Sydney

Sarah K. Danielsson, Professor of History, Queensborough, CUNY

John Docker, Sydney, Australia

John Duncan, affiliated with the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London

Didier Fassin, Professor at the Collège de France and the Institute for Advanced Study

Joanne Smith Finley, Reader in Chinese Studies, Newcastle University, UK

Shannon Fyfe, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, George Mason University; Faculty Fellow, Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy

William Gallois, Professor of the Islamic Mediterranean, University of Exeter

Fatma Muge Gocek, Professor of Sociology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Svenja Goltermann, Professor of Modern History, University of Zurich

Andrei Gómez-Suarez, Senior Research Fellow, Centre of Religion, Reconciliation and Peace, University of Winchester

Penny Green, Professor of Law and Globalisation and Director of the International State Crime Initiative, Queen Mary University of London

John-Paul Himka, Professor Emeritus, University of Alberta

Marianne Hirschberg, Professor, Faculty of Human Sciences, University of Kassel, Germany

Anna Holian, Associate Professor, School of Historical, Philosophical & Religious Studies, Arizona State University

Rachel Ibreck, Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations, Department of Politics and International Relations, Goldsmiths, University of London

Adam Jones, Professor, Political Science, University of British Columbia Okanagan

Rachel Killean, Senior Lecturer, University of Sydney Law School

Brian Klug, Hon. Fellow in Social Philosophy, Campion Hall, University of Oxford, and Hon. Fellow, Parkes Institute for the Study of Jewish/non-Jewish Relations, University of Southampton

Mill Lake, Associate Professor, International Relations Department, London School of Economics

Mark Levene, Emeritus Fellow, University of Southampton

Yosefa Loshitzky, Professorial Research Associate, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London

Thomas MacManus, Senior Lecturer in State Crime, School of Law, Queen Mary University of London

Zachariah Mampilly, Professor, Baruch College and the Graduate Center, CUNY

Benjamin Meiches, Associate Professor of Security Studies and Conflict Resolution, University of Washington-Tacoma

Dirk Moses, Professor of International Relations, City College of New York, CUNY

Eva Nanopoulos, Senior Lecturer in Law, Queen Mary University of London

Jeffrey Ostler, Professor of History Emeritus, University of Oregon

Thomas Earl Porter, Professor of History, North Carolina A&T State University, Greensboro, NC

Michael Rothberg, Professor of English, Comparative Literature, and Holocaust Studies, UCLA

Colin Samson, Professor of Sociology, University of Essex

Victoria Sanford, Lehman Professor of Excellence, Lehman College and the Graduate Center, CUNY

Raz Segal, Associate Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies and Endowed Professor in the Study of Modern Genocide, Stockton University

Elyse Semerdjian, Robert Aram and Marianne Kaloosdian and Stephen and Marian Mugar Chair of Armenian Genocide Studies, Clark University

Martin Shaw, University of Sussex/Institut Barcelona d’Estudis Internacionals

Damien Short, Co-Director of the Human Rights Consortium and Professor of Human Rights and Environmental Justice at the School of Advanced Study, University of London

Ronald Grigor Suny, William H. Sewell, Jr. Distinguished University Professor Emeritus of History and Emeritus Professor of Political Science, University of Michigan

Adam Sutcliffe, Professor of European History, King’s College London

Barry Trachtenberg, Rubin Presidential Chair of Jewish History, Wake Forest University

Enzo Traverso, Professor in the Humanities, Cornell University

Jeremy Varon, Professor of History, The New School, New York

Ernesto Verdeja, Associate Professor of Peace Studies and Global Politics, University of Notre Dame

Johanna Ray Vollhardt, Associate Professor of Psychology, Clark University

Pauline Wakeham, Associate Professor, Department of English, Western University (Canada)

Keith David Watenpaugh, Professor and Director, Human Rights Studies, University of California, Davis

Louise Wise, Lecturer in International Security, University of Sussex

Andrew Woolford, Professor of Sociology and Criminology, University of Manitoba

Ran Zwigenberg, Associate Professor of Asian Studies, History, and Jewish Studies, Pennsylvania State University

 

9 Comments on Statement of Scholars in Holocaust and Genocide Studies on Mass Violence in Israel and Palestine since 7 October
Raz Segal
Dr. Raz Segal is Associate Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies and Endowed Professor in the Study of Modern Genocide at Stockton University. Dr. Segal has held a Harry Frank Guggenheim Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship, and was recently a Senior Fellow at the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies (March-July 2023). His publications include >Genocide in the Carpathians: War, Social Breakdown, and Mass Violence, 1914-1945 (2016); Days of Ruin: The Jews of Munkács during the Holocaust (2013); and he was guest editor of the Hebrew-language special issue onGenocide: Mass Violence and Cultural Erasure of Zmanim: A Historical Quarterly (2018). In addition to scholarly publications, Dr. Segal has published op-eds, book reviews, and larger articles on genocide, state violence, and memory politics in Hebrew, English, and German in The Guardian , LA Times, The Nation, Jewish Currents, Haaretz, +972 Magazine, and Berliner Zeitung , and he has appeared on Democracy Now! and ABC News.