Reactions to The Attack on October 7
Initial reactions to the Hamas terror attack were characterized by cautious expressions of empathy with the victims, condemnation of the terror, and solidarity with Hamas. At pro-Palestine demonstrations, however, there was soon hardly any sign of shock at the terror. The focus was on the “liberation” of Palestine and Hamas as part of the struggle for “liberation” from Israel. “Hope for Palestine […] Left-wing resistance groups support offensive against Israel,” cheered Junge Welt.[1] During such offensives, the hatred against Israel is discharged in slogans such as “Zionists are fascists, they murder children and civilians.”[2] Around the stands at the Rosa Luxemburg Conference, tones could be heard with which the official program did not wish to identify, but which nevertheless provided a glimpse into what moves left-wing hearts and minds: Hamas is needed to strengthen “socialist class consciousness,” their attack is “an expected response to decades of oppression.” These statements are not intended to justify the attack, but to help “understand” it.[3]
The “Understanding” of the Left
It is “understood” that Israel is the perpetrator and that the victims are defending themselves against this perpetrator. This shift between victims and perpetrators is one of the anti-Semitic stereotypes present on the left. This view gained momentum with the start of the ground offensive. High casualty figures and images of Palestinian suffering can be used to mobilize media-effective and emotionalized outrage against Israel and delegitimize Israel as a state. Although Israel’s reaction in the face of such a terrorist attack was predictable, perhaps even calculated by Hamas, the denunciation of Israel can be used to score points with a public in which anti-Semitism in the form of hostility towards Israel is resonant. Behind the outrage over the “humanitarian catastrophe” in the Gaza Strip, the barbaric terror of Hamas disappears, along with the anti-Semitism found in its charter, which also strategically pursues the goal of destroying Israel and all Jews.
The memory of the extermination of the Jews during the Nazi era is an obstacle to the fight for the “liberation” of Palestine and to the expression of hatred towards Israel. It blocks uninhibited criticism of Israel and solidarity with the Palestinians. Thus the slogan: “Free Palestine from German guilt.” Academically, it seems to be backed up by genocide researcher A. Dirk Moses’ attack on the German culture of remembrance. According to him, this culture has become a supervised, cultishly celebrated staging and is combined with the devaluation of colonial crimes in particular and a reflexive solidarity with Israel.[4]
Anti-Semitism And Capitalism
Judith Butler situates the Hamas attack within the history of violence in the Middle East. She refers to what she sees as the systematic seizure of land and its protection through arbitrary measures such as controls and arrests.[5] She also says it is wrong to blame the “apartheid regime alone” for Hamas’ terror. That Israel is an “apartheid regime” seems indisputable to her. Categorically, colonialism and racism are the reference variables for Butler’s contextualization of terror. In such postmodern culturalist post-colonialism, any reference to capitalism remains vague and its crisis unnoticed. Thus, anti-Semitism as a projective way of processing capitalist crises cannot come into view. Instead of reflecting on anti-Semitism, racism and colonialism in their references to each other and in their differences, as well as the context of the crisis of global capitalism, Butler denounces violence “on both sides,” pleads “for true equality and justice” and wishes for “a world that resists the normalization of colonial domination and supports the self-determination and freedom of the Palestinians.” The domination of capital becomes colonial domination. What is hallucinated is an “Eden of the innate rights of man”[6] that abstracts from commodity production and ends up in an abstract universalism. Contextually, however, the universal critique of violence and calls to end it are related to Israel as a military and occupying power, which arbitrarily holds the Gaza Strip in check as an “open-air prison” and is now also bombing it. It is no coincidence that Butler also attacks the German culture of remembrance. It no longer allows compassion for anyone other than the Jews. However, the particularity of the conflict constellations can neither be separated from the generality of capitalist forms nor derived from them in terms of identity logic. Accordingly, different levels such as cultural differences and psychological crisis management must be taken into account. Colonialism, racism, anti-Semitism and antiziganism cannot therefore be understood “beyond” capitalist forms. But they can’t be derived from them in the logic of a mechanistic scheme of cause and effect either.
Actionist left-wing movements, on the other hand, may consider reflecting upon these distinct yet interconnected levels too complicated and find that this reflection contributes little to the desired self-efficacy. Without such reflection, however, practice degenerates into dull actionism that feeds on moral indignation. Practice is directed against Israel as a supposedly imperial and colonial actor and is lived out in Israel-related anti-Semitism in an experience-intensive way and with the good gut feeling of being on the right side in the global struggle for liberation. Taking sides sorts people into evil imperialists and good colonized people. Such certainties ignore the fact that the struggle is fought within the framework of the collapsing capitalist forms of market and state, capital and labor, subject as agent in competition, etc. and is without an emancipatory perspective, because liberation is sought as national liberation within the collapsing state form. This ignores the fact that capitalism has reached a limit with the microelectronic revolution. Capitalism can no longer overcome this limit because of the disappearance of labor as a substance for the accumulation of capital, and this limit is expressed in the various processes of disintegration, not least in the disintegration of states. It is precisely these crisis processes that fuel anti-Semitism as a projective crisis reaction that cannot be separated from capitalism and its crises.
The Dual Character of The State of Israel
Against the one-sided classification of Israel as a capitalist state, Robert Kurz has pointed out the dual character of the state of Israel. It is not simply a colonial product, but essentially a rescue project for Jews threatened by persecution and annihilation and, as such, a project against anti-Semitism. As a capitalist state, it is exposed to all the same processes of social and state disintegration as other capitalist states. Like them, it has to deal with these crises, but it is surrounded by an environment that threatens its existence, and above all it is unable to fall back on reserves of anti-Semitism to deal with the crisis. In this context, national-religious and racist processing strategies come into play. Secular and socialist-oriented Zionism is moving closer to nationally and religiously orthodox movements and parties. Identitarian and authoritarian tendencies in Israel are taking on the form of theocratic, national-religious movements that are combined with anti-Arab projections. These tendencies are gaining more and more influence on government policy and are institutionally anchored in the Netanyahu government. Rational security policy strategies to defend the existence of Israel are mixed with irrationalisms of ultra-orthodox promises of salvation. However, authoritarian, identitarian, right-wing mobilizations are not simply “typically Israeli.” They can be seen in all capitalist states as an attempt to cope with global processes of disintegration. With regard to Israel, it is noteworthy that the shift to the right is being met with resolute criticism and a determined struggle, which is primarily directed against the judicial reform aimed at restricting the control of the government by the Supreme Court.
Anti-Semitism Instead of a Radical Critique of Capitalism
Instead of advancing towards a radical critique of capitalism in the face of the global crisis processes, left-wing movements stick to the familiar. They continue to see themselves as national liberation movements without acknowledging that, in view of the failure of recuperative development due to the immanent limitations of capitalism, an autonomous state cannot be a prospect. All dreams of a “two-state solution” fail because the basis of modern statehood breaks away with the barriers to capital accumulation that can no longer be overcome. In this paradoxical situation, traditional forms of state-building are combined with denationalization in the form of warlodization and mafia-like structures. The global crisis processes have long since steamrolled the possibilities of national revolutionary liberation. This means that all strategies that rely on a pole of capitalist immanence – be it class struggle or the state as a regulating authority or even as a haven of liberation – are failing.
In this way, an emancipatory overcoming of capitalism cannot come into view and the core of the crisis as an internal barrier to capital accumulation must remain incomprehensible. As long as the left remains blind to the critique of the capitalist constitution in its fetishistic forms, it remains open to a crisis ideology in which the crisis is processed ideologically by projecting it onto “the Jews” and the “Jewish state.” In anti-Semitism, which feeds on the collective unconscious, Israel is pilloried as “the Jew” of states and becomes the object of projective crisis processing. This can be linked to stereotypes such as the differentiation between rapacious capital and the creative capital that is tied to labor. This expresses the separation of the abstract (money) and the concrete (labor), whereby the abstract can be projected onto “the Jews.” They become masters of money and the mind. They are ascribed a superior power by means of which they are able to conspire and rule the world.
The imagination of a world conspiracy was a core element of the Nazis’ anti-Semitic propaganda. It turned up again in the Hamas charter of 1988 and becomes effective in battles aimed at the annihilation of Israel and all Jews. In the anti-Semitic world view, the militarily defended existence of Israel is worse than any other form of oppression and violence. The delusion that the world would be liberated if it were “free of Jews” is therefore obvious in this view. The abstract domination of capitalism can be concretized in “the Jews” and in the “Jewish state.” Seen as perpetrators of conspiratorial deeds, they can be identified as the masterminds behind oppression and domination. Liberation from “the Jews” takes the place of liberation from the capitalist socialization constituted in the fetishistic interrelation of value and dissociation, capital and labor, economy and politics. The empty and uncanny irrational capitalist self-purpose of turning money into more money can supposedly be identified and made tangible. Powerlessness becomes an imagined power to act. Capitalism appears to be transformable without one having to touch its fetishistic structure. Money and labor, a state that regulates the market, etc. can be retained and the dissociation of female-connoted reproduction can remain in the kitchen of being considered a secondary contradiction. Transformation can become a return to an “original” capitalism of honest work and good political regulation that also brings crises under control. Normality seems to be saved. “Under the spell of the tenacious irrationality of the whole, the irrationality of people is normal.” It is always “ready in political attitudes to overflow even this instrumental reason.”[7] In times of escalating crises, it is tempting to cling to the normality of the irrational social whole and to defend it by fending off and destroying anything that supposedly threatens it – be it refugees, foreigners, the supposedly “work-shy” or, above all, the Jews.
The anti-Semitism of the left reflects the deficits of left-wing critiques of capitalism. What is decisive is that, despite the failure of commodity production and its promise of immanent emancipation, the left shies away from criticizing the fetishistic social context of the capitalist constitution, which confronts individuals as abstract domination. Instead of making this the object of emancipatory critique – the interrelation of value and dissociation, production and circulation, capital and labor, market and state – the attempt is made to attribute domination to specific actors. This paves the way for personalization, emotionalization, indignation, and conspiracy fantasies – a conglomeration that can be “unleashed” and aggressively discharged at any time in projective anti-Semitism.
In a situation in which the social contradictions can no longer be overcome immanently, leftists have also contributed to a mixture of class struggle thinking, practice fetishism and theoretical hostility so that categorical critique can be disarmed and the supposedly “concrete” can be positioned against the supposedly “abstract.” In contrast to the Nazis, whose anti-Semitism was linked to Fordist accumulation, capitalist accumulation in the current crises comes to nothing and also leaves the subjects “naked” in their lack of prospects. Their ability to compete has been deprived. In such hopelessness, the boundaries between murder and suicide threaten to become blurred. The delusion of projective crisis management could mix with tendencies that lead to the destruction of the self and the world in the capitalist form in an immanently hopeless situation. In the “Middle East,” the disintegration of world capital comes to a head in the unpromising and at the same time dangerous actions of state actors who, in the midst of the disintegration processes, are looking for a “foothold,” not least militarily, and at the same time for strategic advantages within the disintegrating state constellations.
[1] junge Welt from 09/10/23
[2] Jüdische Allgemeine from 2/9/24
[3] Tagesspiegel from 1/13/24
[4] “Der Katechismus der Deutschen”
[5] Freitag no. 42, 2023.
[6] Marx, Capital Volume 1, New York, 1976, 280.
[7] Adorno, “Opinion, Delusion, Society”
Originally published, in a slightly modified form, in konkret 4/2024
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