By Michael Walzer
Friday, June 14,
2024
Something is seriously wrong with the Left today (or, at
least, with large parts of the Left—I recognise that exceptions apply).
Described abstractly, what’s wrong is the triumph of the ideological project
and its slogans over the interests of people on the ground. Old leftists will
remember Lenin’s distinction between revolutionary consciousness and
trade-union consciousness—between militants who sought to create a communist
society at any cost and workers who were looking for higher wages and a decent
workplace. Or consider a much older but similar distinction in the biblical
story of the exodus from Egypt—between the future priests hoping to raise up a
“holy nation” and the ordinary Israelites dreaming of milk and honey. I want to
reverse the values assigned to these two groups by the biblical writers and by
Lenin. Leftists go badly wrong when they forget about milk and honey, about
higher wages, and about the people on the ground.
Right now, this error is most clearly expressed by those
left-wing militants who defend Hamas in the name of “resistance,”
anti-colonialism, and liberation (or who imagine slaughter as a necessary means
to liberation). They take this position without regard for the Israelis
murdered on 7 October and without any serious interest in the people of Gaza. I
know that many of the participants in the campus demonstrations are thinking of
the hungry refugees, the shattered apartment buildings, and the rising count of
dead and injured. But these concerns don’t determine the slogans the protesters
shout or the politics those slogans promote.
As the protests continued, the government of Iran,
Hamas’s chief supporter, was engaged in a brutal crackdown on Iranian women and
girls seeking nothing more than minimal freedom. Here was a model of a future
Palestine that the protesters didn’t dare look at. In truth, they didn’t want
to think about the Palestinians who had lived for years under a brutally
repressive Hamas regime, or about the women who would be subject to Islamist
discipline in a fully developed Hamas state—let alone about the Jews who would
be murdered or displaced if Hamas achieved its stated goal of annihilating
Israel.
Even the Gazans suffering today—the necessary focus of
any left-wing politics—are little more than emblems of Israeli cruelty in much
leftist discourse. It is as if they have been conscripted for a political
purpose: the elimination of the Jewish state. Leftist militants refuse to
address Hamas’s military strategy of embedding its fighters and weapons in the
civilian population. Nor will they acknowledge the extensive tunnel network
Hamas has constructed beneath Gaza, in which its fighters shelter during Israeli
bombardment but to which civilians are denied admittance. Nor is there much
leftist interest in Palestinian wellbeing after the war or, more concretely, in
how a regime of reconstruction might be organised in Gaza.
Not long after 7 October, when the Israeli
counteroffensive was just beginning, Hamas supporters decided to bring the war
home—perhaps in the belief that everything is finally determined here in the
US, the great imperial power. The most readily available space for battle is
the university campus, hence the protests that soon involved students and
police in an ironic version of the class war (the students represent the
bourgeoisie and the police officers are working class). Now the immediate
issues are freedom of speech (for the protesters, but not necessarily for
anyone else), financial divestment from companies doing business in Israel, and
an end to all academic cooperation with Israeli universities. The goal is to
turn Israel into a pariah state, isolated and alone.
The preeminent issue for American leftists is the
American commitment to Israel and the ongoing supply of weapons. So, from the
beginning, leftists demanded that a ceasefire be imposed by the US, assumed to
be Israel’s puppet-master, and enforced by an immediate end to US military aid.
That this would have meant a decisive victory for Hamas was rarely
acknowledged, but that was surely the intention of those who organised the
campaign. Perhaps they imagined a double victory: ending the Zionist project and
furthering the decline of the American empire.
There is another war at home, directed not at American
support for Israel but at American supporters of Israel—that is, at Zionists or
at Jews assumed to be Zionists. This is mostly a matter of low-level harassment
and exclusion not organised violence (yet), but it draws upon a long history of
left-wing antisemitism, and it consumes a lot of the energy of the pro-Hamas
Left. Though this hostility is ideological, directed at those considered
privileged white supporters of Israeli settler-colonialism, it is also
mindless—a kind of left-wing know-nothingism that begins by knowing nothing
about the actual population of Israel. Intense ideological commitment often
leads to a politics of focused hatred against enemies of the cause. I am old
enough to remember Maoist propaganda campaigns against the “running dogs of
imperialism.”
There are precedents for this triumph of ideological
commitment over political engagement with ordinary people, and I want to look
closely at one example in which I was personally involved. But first a
question: Isn’t it strange to call this triumph “leftist”? Hasn’t it always
been the purpose of the Left, and the honour of many leftists, to fight for the
well-being of men and women in trouble; to build a mass movement that includes
everyone willing to join? Sometimes, yes, but not always. Ideological radicalism
and revolutionary wish-fulfilment have had an extraordinary hold on generations
of leftists.
Leftists out of power often assume that leftists in power
are ideologically faithful—that they live by the doctrines they proclaim. If
the Soviet Union calls itself a “workers’ state,” and if factories are
nationalised and farms collectivised, then almost nothing else matters—not
starving Ukrainians, not dissidents sent to Siberian labour camps, not murdered
Jewish writers and artists, not old revolutionaries brought to trial on
trumped-up charges and shot. In fact, crimes like these can’t have happened. Any
leftists who criticise the regime’s brutality are enemies of the
workers—“social fascists,” as German social democrats were called during the
1930s in an early example of focused hatred.
The Hamasniks in America today are the descendants of
those leftists who defended Stalinism. But they also have more recent American
ancestors.
***
Student protesters on our campuses these last months
often invoke the example of the anti-war movement in the late 1960s, and that
is indeed a useful example. In fact, there were two different anti-war
movements back then, or two groups of activists motivated in different ways.
The two overlapped and sometimes worked together. But one group was
ideologically driven, while the other, if I can coin a phrase, was
people-driven. One was focused on the matter of US imperialism, the other on
the images of burning villages in Vietnam; one looked forward to a communist
victory, the other, while still opposing the American war, dreaded it.
In 1967, I was co-chair of the Cambridge Neighborhood
Committee on Vietnam (CNCV)—a position I won by talking too much at the
founding meetings. My co-chair wasn’t a professional leftist or an academic,
she was a young woman who worked in film and turned out to be an extremely
competent manager of the Committee’s daily work. I was in charge of political
argument. The work was community organising against the war, of the kind
modelled by Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Our activists, most of whom
were students, went door to door looking for someone who would host a block
meeting at which one of us could explain our political position. At the same
time, we were collecting signatures to force a referendum on the war in the
city of Cambridge, MA.
Ours was a modest politics, so people with different
views could easily cooperate. We did not organise marches through the city, so
I did not have to argue against carrying VietCong flags, as many of our
activists would have wanted to do. Around the country, the flags were an early
sign of the coming divisions. I did have to argue with people from the
sectarian Left who thought that the referendum was altogether too modest a
project. They wanted to start the revolution—as, later on, some of our activists,
or people like them, wanted to bring the war home.
What were the differences, not yet fully apparent, in
CNCV? I had better begin with my own position, which was muddled, to say the
least. I was then (and for many years after) closely associated with the
magazine Dissent, the founders and editors of which were my
political mentors. They were mostly ex-Trotskyists, now democratic socialists
and internationalists, and some of them had travelled a lot, meeting comrades
abroad. They literally knew the names of all the independent leftists that the
Vietnamese communists had murdered. This made it difficult for them to support
an anti-war movement whose work, objectively considered, would lead to a
communist victory. They would probably have endorsed the American intervention
if only a government had emerged in Saigon to defend democracy, end corruption,
and win hearts and minds in the countryside.
Alas, there was no such government. The VietCong won the
battle for hearts and minds, and the American war became a war against the
rural population of Vietnam. I was one of the youngest dissentniks and probably
the first to join the call for an American withdrawal. But I didn’t long for a
communist victory. I knew, and I had been told by my fellow editors and
writers, that cruelty and repression would follow. I just thought that the
immediate cruelties of the war, above all, the burning villages, required a
political response. In CNCV, there were people like me—activists without an
ideology, living in the present. But there were many others who thought that
they were engaged in a world-historical struggle against American imperialism:
they are the nearest ancestors of today’s pro-Hamas militants.
CNCV eventually obtained enough petition signatures (and
pro-bono legal assistance) to force the city council to authorise a city-wide
referendum on the war in November ’67. Some 40 percent of the people of
Cambridge voted against the war, which was a victory of sorts. But we lost
every working-class neighbourhood and swept only Harvard Square and its
surroundings, which was not what our activists had hoped for. It was, however,
what we should have expected by sending mostly draft-exempt college students to
knock on the doors of people whose kids were serving in the army, some in
Vietnam. We hadn’t thought much about how to address the men and women we aimed
to convince. It was community organising without a basic respect for the
community. So we probably contributed to the rightward drift of the working
class in the decades that followed.
After the referendum, CNCV broke apart. Some of our
activists moved into draft resistance, while others joined the various
fragments of the 1960s Left: Maoists, Weathermen, or what remained of SDS. The
activists I call people-driven turned to electoral politics in the belief that
political campaigns like those of Eugene McCarthy (whom I supported) or Robert
Kennedy might actually end the war. In the summer of 1968, we were at the
Chicago convention, nominating McCarthy (after Kennedy was murdered), while the
ideologically driven leftists were in the streets fighting with the police and
helping Nixon to win the November election.
After that, the war dragged on for years, though with
declining popular support. A new organisation, Veterans Against the War, helped
a lot, I think, to convince Americans that there was something radically wrong
with our engagement in Vietnam. Theirs was the most concrete and least ideological
opposition movement—they talked about their experience in Vietnam, and they
didn’t talk about imperialism.
When the war finally ended, the communists in power
behaved exactly as my Dissent colleagues had predicted they would.
Thousands of Vietnamese men and women were sent to “re-education” camps where
they were beaten, tortured, and killed. Fearing the camps, tens of thousands
fled the country by sea. The exodus of “boat people” continued for almost ten
years; about 25 percent of their number—as many as 200,000 men, women, and
children—drowned trying to reach distant shores. The ideological Left, with a
few exceptions, found that it had nothing to say on behalf of these victims of
the regime it had helped bring to power. The victims were invisible or
unimportant, given that American imperialism had been defeated.
My friends—the people-driven activists who had also
helped to make the communist victory possible—were at least critical of the new
government in Saigon and ready to help its fleeing citizens. Still, ours was a
difficult politics: condemning the war while acknowledging the repression to
come if the war was lost, and then condemning the repression. But I think we
did better than those leftists who rushed to Hanoi to celebrate the communist
victory, without any thought for the people in the South.
***
What would a better politics—or what I
described as a decent Left after 9/11—look like today? It would have to
oppose both Hamas and the current government of Israel; it would have to be
people-centred, equally concerned with the wellbeing of Palestinians and
Israelis. For the Palestinians, this requires, first, a plan for the
reconstruction of Gaza and, second, the opening of a path toward
self-determination. For Israelis, it requires the re-establishment of physical
security after the trauma of 7 October. But these requirements have a crucial
precondition: the defeat of religious and ideological zealots on both sides.
Hamas’s Islamist zealots are a threat to ordinary
Israelis—to their state and to their lives. And messianic irredentists and
ultra-nationalists in Israel are a threat to ordinary Palestinians—to their
already constricted living space and to their lives. These groups also threaten
their own people, whom they want to discipline and mobilise for a holy war.
A decent left-wing politics shouldn’t be hard to figure
out: support anyone, Palestinian or Israeli, who aims to secure freedom and
security for both nations. An ideological focus on American imperialism and
Israeli “settler-colonialism” isn’t just a diversion from a people-centred
politics, it is actually a program for a war against the Israelis—a war that
holds no promise of freedom for the Palestinians. The call for total victory
“from the river to the sea” in both its Hamas and its messianic Zionist versions
is, similarly, a program for war, each zealotry against the other. It is time
for leftists to forego ideology and think only of a life of safety and comfort
for Israelis and Palestinians alike.
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