By Helen Lewis
Friday, October 13, 2023
The terror attack on Israel by Hamas has been a
divisive—if clarifying—moment for the left. The test that it presented was
simple: Can you condemn the slaughter of civilians, in massacres that now
appear to have been calculatedly sadistic and outrageous, without equivocation
or whataboutism? Can you lay down, for a moment, your legitimate criticisms of
Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, West Bank settlements, and the conditions in
Gaza, and express horror at the mass murder of civilians?
In corners of academia and social-justice activism where
the identity of the oppressor and the oppressed are never in doubt, many people
failed that test. In response to a fellow progressive who argued that targeting
civilians is always wrong, the Yale professor Zareena Grewal replied:
“Settlers are not civilians. This is not hard.” (She has since locked her X
account.) Chicago’s Black Lives Matter chapter posted a picture of a
paraglider, referencing the gunmen who descended on civilians at a music
festival near the Gaza border from the air. (The chapter said in a statement that
“we aren’t proud” of the post, which was later deleted.) Harvard student groups
posted a letter stating that its signatories “hold the Israeli regime entirely
responsible for all unfolding violence.” (Several of the named groups have
since withdrawn their
endorsement.)
The New York branch of the Democratic Socialists of
America promoted a rally where protesters chanted “resistance is justified when
people are occupied” and one participant displayed a swastika. These
actions prompted criticism
by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, perhaps the DSA’s most prominent
figure, and the resignation of members including the comedian Sarah Silverman.
In a statement,
the New York City Democratic Socialists regretted the “confusion” that its
rhetoric had caused, but added: “We are also concerned that some have chosen to
focus on a rally while ignoring the root causes of violence in the region, the
far-right Netanyahu government’s escalating human rights violations and
explicitly genocidal rhetoric, and the dehumanization of the Palestinian
people.”
In the United Kingdom, where I live, a journalist for the
hard-left outlet Novara, Rivkah Brown, tweeted
that “the struggle for freedom is rarely bloodless and we shouldn’t apologise
for it.” (She has since deleted the post, saying she responded “too quickly and
in a moment of heightened emotion.”) Ellie Gomersall, the president of the
National Union of Students in Scotland, apologized for reposting content
justifying Hamas’s actions. Two days earlier, Gomersall had accused the
British Labour Party leader Keir Starmer of being “complicit in the deaths of …
trans people” for saying that “a woman is a female adult.” Got that? A
politician with an essentialist view of womanhood is complicit in the deaths of
innocents, but a terrorist indiscriminately murdering people at a music
festival must be understood in context.
In the fevered world of social media, progressive
activists have often sought to discredit hateful statements and unjust policies
by describing them as “violence,” even “genocide.” This tendency seems
grotesque if the same activists are not prepared to criticize Hamas, a group
whose founding
charter is explicitly genocidal: “The Day of Judgement will not come
about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide
behind stones and trees.”
***
Many of those making inflammatory statements come
from what’s sometimes known as the “intersectional left.” This tendency is
strongly influenced by the academic disciplines of queer theory and critical
race theory, and by the postcolonial idea of the “subaltern,”
or marginalized class. Like woke, intersectionality has
become a boo-word for
the right—but unlike woke, it is a label that some activists
proudly embrace, particularly academics and young feminists.
I will go to my grave defending the original conception
of intersectionality, a legal doctrine advanced by the American critical race
theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw. She made the useful observation that civil-rights
legislation has usually treated protected characteristics such as sex and race
as discrete, when in fact they are often interlinked. One of her examples was a
St. Louis car plant that,
for many years, hired white women and Black men but never Black women. Even
after management stopped discriminating, Black women always ranked low on the
seniority list and therefore were especially vulnerable to layoffs. Yet how
could they sue when they were not subject to racism or sexism per se, but an
intersection of the two?
However, Crenshaw herself has expressed surprise at how
the meaning of intersectionality has changed through its
invocation in pop culture. “This is what happens when an idea travels beyond
the context and the content,” she told Vox in
2019. In escaping from the academy into the mainstream, intersectionality
morphed into both a crude tallying of oppression points and an assumption that
social-justice struggles fit neatly together—with all of the marginalized
people on one side and the powerful on the other.
That’s how you end up with Queers for
Palestine when being queer in Palestine is difficult and dangerous.
(In 2016, a Hamas commander was executed after
being accused of theft and gay sex.) It’s also how you end up with candidates
for Labour Party leadership signing a pledge that insists there
“is no material conflict between trans rights and women’s rights,” even when—as
in the eligibility rules for women’s sports—some wins for one group plainly
come at the expense of the other. The pop version of intersectionality cannot
deal with the complexity of real human life, where we can all be, in Jean-Paul
Sartre’s phrase, “half-victims, half-accomplices, like everyone else.” In fact,
you can support the Palestinian cause without excusing acts of terrorism
committed by Hamas. You can question Israel’s military response without
excusing acts of terrorism committed by Hamas. In fact, maintaining the
principle that targeting civilians is wrong gives you the moral authority to
criticize any Israeli response that creates a humanitarian crisis.
Fitting Israel into the intersectional framework has
always been difficult, because its Jewish citizens are both historically
oppressed—the survivors of an attempt to wipe them out entirely—and currently
in a dominant position over the Palestinians, as demonstrated by the Netanyahu
government’s decision to restrict power and water supplies to Gaza. The
simplistic logic of pop intersectionality cannot reconcile this, and the
subject caused schisms within the left long before Saturday’s attacks. In 2017,
Linda Sarsour, one of the organizers of the Women’s March, told The
Nation that Zionism and feminism were incompatible: “It just
doesn’t make any sense for someone to say, ‘Is there room for people who
support the state of Israel and do not criticize it in the movement?’ There
can’t be in feminism.” In January 2018, several pro-Palestinian groups boycotted a
Women’s March because it featured the actor Scarlett Johansson, who once made
an ad for
an Israeli company that has a factory in the West Bank. On the other side,
Jewish groups condemned three
of the Women’s March organizers, including Sarsour,
for associating with the openly anti-Semitic Nation of Islam leader Louis
Farrakhan.
The leftist belief in the righteousness of “punching up,”
a derivation of standpoint theory,
is also important here. Again, this idea has mutated from the reasonable
observation that different groups have different knowledge based on their
experience—I have never experienced being pulled over by a traffic cop as a
Black man, and that limits my understanding of the police—to the idea that
different rules apply to you depending on your social position. When an
oppressed group uses violence against the oppressor, that is justified
“resistance.” Many of us accept a mild version of this proposition: The British
suffragettes turned to window
smashing and bombing after
deciding that letter writing and marches were useless, and history now
remembers them as heroines. But somehow, in the case of the incursion from Gaza
into Israel, the idea of “punching up” was extended to the murder of
children. I simply cannot comprehend how any self-proclaimed feminist can watch
footage of armed
militants manhandling a
woman whose pants are soaked with what looks like blood and decide that she has
the power in that situation—and deserves her fate.
The sheer number of apologies and climbdowns that
followed the initial wave of inflammatory posts suggests that some of their
authors issued knee-jerk statements of solidarity before they understood
exactly what they were endorsing. As the full extent of the weekend’s barbarity
becomes clear, some on the intersectional left are—to their small
credit—revising their initial reactions. But others are doubling down.
Confronted with real violence by genocidal terrorists, they failed the test.
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