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THE NATIONAL INTEREST
Hamas, the Jews, and the Illiberal Left
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Photo-Illustration: Lev Radin/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images
THE NATIONAL INTEREST OCT. 16, 2023
Hamas, the Jews, and the Illiberal Left
The schism on the left is not just about the Middle East.
By Jonathan Chait, who’s been a New York political columnist since 2011.
For many progressive American Jews, the horror and shock of a massacre of Israeli civilians has been compounded by the response by vocal segments of the far left to either withhold condemnation or cheer the murders outright.
Writers like Michelle Goldberg, Julia Ioffe, and my colleague Eric Levitz, all of whom rank among the writers I most admire, have written anguished columns about the alienation of Jewish progressives from the far left. I think all their points are totally correct. But I find the frame of their response too narrow. They are treating apologias for Hamas as a factually or logically flawed application of left-wing ideals. I believe, to the contrary, that Hamas defenders are applying their own principles correctly. The problem is the principles themselves.
It was around 2014 that this kind of illiberal thinking began exploding in various progressive spaces. In 2015, I wrote a story for this magazine about the rise of the illiberal left within the progressive movement. Progressive critics of my argument, while often willing to mock cancellations, firings, or other discrete manifestations of this new ideology, were skeptical that it was an ideological phenomenon. The most common response was that the shift was just college kids going through a phase.
That blithe dismissal, most commonly expressed in shorthand with references to “college teens” or “Oberlin sophomores,” has aged badly. Illiberal left-wing norms quickly spread to the media, political activism, publishing, and other cultural high ground where progressives have (or had) enough critical mass to impose them.
When I say illiberalism, I am not referring broadly to all ideas that lie to the left of liberalism. There are some proposals that I believe would make the world a better place (Medicare for All) and others that I think would make it worse (abolishing the police), but none of these are illiberal. I’m describing a way of thinking about political means, not ends.
Obviously almost any scheme of ideological categorization has gray areas where one tendency evolves into another without a clear delineation. That said, there is a fairly simple way to understand differences in the political model used by liberals and their critics on the left.
Liberals believe political rights are universal. Basic principles like democracy, free speech, and human rights apply equally to all people, without regard to the content of their political values. (This of course very much includes Palestinians, who deserve the same rights as Jews or any other people, and whose humanity is habitually ignored by Israeli conservatives and their American allies.) A liberal would abhor the use of political violence or repression, however evil the targets.
A variety of left-wing alternatives respond that liberalism ignores power differentials by class, race, or gender. The illiberal left believes treating everybody equally, when the power is so unequal, merely serves to maintain existing structures of power. It follows from their critique that the legitimacy of a tactic can only be assessed with reference to whether it is being used by the oppressor or the oppressed. Is it okay for, say, a mob of protesters to shout down a lecture? Liberals would say no. Illiberal leftists would need to know who was the speaker and who was the mob before they could answer.
“Decolonization” is one of those strands of illiberal leftism. It has a model of the world in which conflicts are analyzed as a struggle pitting settler-colonist-Europeans, who are evil, against native/indigenous/BIPOC people. Like other illiberal leftist theories, the decolonization model does not leave room to judge the morality of any methods.
The liberal response to these alternative ideas is not to deny that power differentials exist, but that discarding liberalism in the name of social justice invites repression. To permit any political faction to use tactics they would never accept if used against them is to grant them a license for tyranny that will never be revoked.
To many progressives, this whole debate has seemed abstract, trivial, and counterproductive. Even progressives who are not supporters of the illiberal left have been reluctant to criticize it. They see the left’s foibles as a distraction from the larger fight with the radical right — a fight that, to be sure, I also see (and have always seen) as the paramount struggle in American politics.
It is easy to understand why a progressive could arrive at this conclusion in good faith. The illiberal left has little ability to use state power — it is a miniscule faction within the Democratic Party, and the United States government is bound by robust First Amendment protections. (For this reason, state censorship is still mostly carried out by the Republican Party, whose illiberal wing is vastly larger). The stakes of this ideology have therefore been confined to the private sphere. Left-wing illiberalism can get dissenters fired from a job, but not sent to a Gulag.
One observation I’ve shared with many analysts well to my left is that the debate over this illiberalism and the social norms it has spawned — demands for deference in the name of allyship, describing opposing ideas as a form of harm, and so on — has tracked an older debate within the left over communism. Communism provided real-world evidence of how an ideology that denies political rights to anybody deemed to be the oppressor laid the theoretical groundwork for repression and murder.
There have been conscious echoes of this old divide in the current dispute over Hamas. The left-wing historian Gabriel Winant has a column in Dissent urging progressives not to mourn dead Israeli civilians because that sentiment will be used to advance the Zionist project. Winant sounds eerily like an old communist fellow traveler explaining that the murders of the kulaks or the Hungarian nationalists are the necessary price of defending the revolution. “The impulse, repeatedly called ‘humane’ over the past week, to find peace by acknowledging equally the losses on all sides rests on a fantasy that mourning can be depoliticized,” he argues, calling such soft-minded sentiment “a new Red Scare.” Making the perfect omelette always requires some broken eggs in the form of innocent people who made the historical error of belonging to, or perhaps being born into, an enemy class.
But more than three decades have passed since the Soviet Union existed or China’s government was recognizably Marxist. And so the liberal warning about the threat of left-wing illiberalism seemed abstract and bloodless.
On October 7, it suddenly became bloody and concrete. It didn’t happen here, of course. The shock of it was that many leftists revealed just how far they would be willing to follow their principles. “People have repeated over and over again over the last few days that you ‘cannot tell Palestinians how to resist,’” notes (without contradicting the sentiment) Arielle Angel, editor-in-chief of the left-wing Jewish Currents.
Concepts like this, treating the self-appointed representative of any oppressed group as beyond criticism, are banal on the left. Yet for some progressive Jews, it is shocking to see it extended to the slaughter of babies, even though that is its logical endpoint. The radical rhetoric of decolonization, with its glaring absence of any limiting principles, was not just a rhetorical cover to bully some hapless school administrator into changing the curriculum. Phrases like “by any means necessary” were not just figures of speech. Any means included any means, very much including murder.
Both Julia Ioffe and Eric Levitz have pointed out that decolonization logic ignores the fact that half of Israel’s Jewish population does not have European origins and came to Israel after suffering the same ethnic cleansing as the Palestinians. This is correct. But what if it weren’t? If every Israeli Jew descended from Ashkenazi stock, would it be okay to shoot their babies?
I realize Eric and Julia don’t think so. That they feel compelled to even contest this point underscores the barbarous premises of their opponents. There is a tendency on the Jewish left to fight left-wing antisemitism on narrow grounds. Why are progressives treating Jews as the oppressor? Don’t they realize we are victims, too?
It is often the case that a movement’s treatment of Jews serves as a broader indicator of its health. It’s not an accident that the Republican Party has become more attractive to antisemites as it has grown more paranoid and authoritarian. What the far left revealed about its disposition toward Jews is not just a warning for the Jews but a warning for all progressives who care about democracy and humanity.
The pro-Hamas left is not merely indicating an indifference toward Jews. It is revealing the illiberal left’s inherent cruelty, repression, and inhumanity.
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Irregular musings from the center left.
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