Woke-State Solution: Diversifying Anti-Zionism Was a Symptom of its Impasse
21 November 2024
What is missing in today’s intellectual debate on the Gaza War, is not the critique of Palestinian nationalism as identity politics; there is an abundance of that. What we actually lack is a good-faith critique of Palestine-related identity politics. For example, the pseudo-theory of “woke anti-Semitism” is a conservative, self-soothing, and conspiratorial discourse that has misleadingly sought to explain all Western ceasefire demonstrations as being yet another trap for the “woke” mob.
A good-faith critique of Palestinian nationalism was exemplified by Lebanese leftist Najah Wakeem, when he jokingly and respectfully asked his friend, Palestinian revolutionary leader George Habash, whether members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) actually knew anything about Marxism. This question came in the context of the provincialist or pseudo-Marxist Palestinization of the Arab-Israeli conflict, an identitarian divorce from Pan-Arabism, before and after the Arab defeat in 1967. Jordanian Marxist Ghaleb Al-Halsa went against this current because he did not see Palestinian statelessness as a question of an oppressed identity, so much as part of the general crisis and the limitations of the newly formed capitalist states in the Middle East. For him, everybody was a Palestinian because the capitalist state was the private club of the few. Al-Halsa worried about Palestinian identity itself becoming an exclusive club therefore he sought to dismantle the mythical portrayal of the noble Palestinian little man vs. the (most likely rich) Arab scoundrel, a frequent trope that Al-Halsa noticed in Palestinian nationalist literature.
Complicating matters further, the rise of Hamas in 1987 replaced the dichotomy of good Palestinian vs. bad Arab with the binary of the true Muslim Palestinian believer vs. the stray and corrupt secular Palestinian who failed to protect the land and the religion. This Palestinian culture war would reach its violent peak in 2006 when Hamas was voted into the Palestinian parliament and the “political division” crisis exploded between the Fatah-administered Palestinian Authority, which ended up ruling parts of the West Bank, and Hamas, which ended up ruling in Gaza after a factional armed conflict. The crisis would paralyze any Palestinian elections to this day, compelling the Palestinian millennial left to find alternative political avenues within the international NGO system already set up by the international community through the Oslo Accords in the areas of human rights, development, humanitarian aid, academia, journalism, culture, and the Boycott Sanctions Divestment (BDS) campaign. This way, Western cultural and humanitarian industries absorbed the orphans of the Palestinian ideological void, dampening and diverting the revolutionary energies of young Arab intellectuals.
The merger of the Palestinian millennial left with the international professional managerial class set the stage for a new revisionist trend in the identitarian definition of anti-Zionism, shaped by the failure of the Arab Spring’s 2011 revolutions after the electoral victories (and downfall) of Islamists in several Arab states, the Syrian catastrophe, and the rise of ISIS; factors that caused a grand retreat of the Middle Eastern millennial left from working class and anti-authoritarian politics, into the embrace of the Middle Eastern bureaucratic and national security state and into the already-existing NGO superstructure, to focus only on secularism, feminism, and “anti-patriarchy” activism.
By 2016, Palestinian director Maisaloon Hamood, at the Toronto International Film Festival, would premiere her feminist drama-comedy, which would set the upcoming identitarian dichotomy within the question of Palestinian Liberation, pitting the feminist and queer noble Palestinian protagonists against a corrupt, hypocritical, religious fundamentalist, misogynist Palestinian male villain. That was right before Donald Trump took office in the US. The features of this new Palestinian identity would become more defined when Linda Sarsour, co-founding leader of the Women's March, declared on January 21, 2017 that she was: “unapologetically Muslim-American, unapologetically Palestinian-American, and unapologetically from Brooklyn, New York”. Within a couple of years, the diversification of anti-Zionism would become parallel to a similar process within the Democratic Party, up until the election of Rashida Talib to the US Congress.
This post-2016 moment in the US has exported more than a mere liberal cultural project for diversity and a performative style of protest. What came out of America, gleefully embraced around the world, was the apolitical, hostile, highly competitive, and anti-social “influencer” business model of the socially bloodthirsty American culture war. That model was nothing less than the reaffirmation of the death of politics; an identitarian balkanization caused by a tug-of-war featuring “wokeness” (reactionary anti-conservatism) and anti-wokeness (conservatism’s defensive league) at both ends.
In September 2019, Palestine witnessed its own Women’s March after the femicide of 21-year-old makeup artist Israa Ghrayeb. The movement, Talaat, means “stepping out” in Arabic had the slogan: “No Free Palestine Without Free Women”. In September of 2021, Qaus, the Haifa-based leading Palestinian queer-rights NGO, launched a campaign of advocacy and pamphleteers with the slogan “A Queer Call for Freedom: Palestine is for All of Us” a campaign that targeted not the Israeli audience, but the Palestinian one, especially after the improvement in relations between the queer community and the majority in Palestine during the Habba, the anti-colonial protests in May of the same year, the largest since the Second Intifada.
Understanding Talaat and Qaus requires contemplating how these movements emerged not only within the context of local debates on discrimination against women and queers but also within the dynamics of inter-Palestinian identity politics, in an already existing Palestinian society of the spectacle, in which Fatah adopts the identity of the noble and loyal nationalist as the true liberator of Palestine and Hamas adopts the identity of the authentic religious zealot as the true liberator of Palestine. Therefore, Talaat and Qaus believed that only a true feminist and a queer ally can liberate Palestine. Many found this nationalization of social justice appealing because it offers a nouveau patriotism that affirms a new value system as dogmatic and self-righteous as the traditionalism it aims to displace.
Any questioning of these campaigns, on how to arrive to the goal of a free and diverse Palestine beyond the moral slogan “Palestine is for all of us” and beyond the culture of Diversity Equality Inclusion (DEI) workshops, was met with accusations of using the anti-colonial metanarrative to postpone or continue disregarding individual rights, regardless of the legitimacy of this strategy-related question. This “us vs. them” mentality was created by the importation of the apolitical business model of the American culture war. This impulse to reject a culture of dialogue among the left leads as ever to sectarianism, a thing that invited Metras Magazine, the leading pro-resistance leftist media organization in Palestine, after years of apparently supporting Qaus' politics, to revert to a bigoted and retrograde stance.
Talaat and Qaus, had good and relevant things to say but never had an actual working plan for Palestinian liberation beyond vague calls for ending both Palestinian and Israeli patriarchies, including the “Hamas patriarchy”. The intersectional abstractness of abolishing “The Patriarchy” displaced the concrete goal of dismantling “The Colony” and the manifestations of this “lifestyle anti-colonialism” seemed unreal and farcical. In 2019, Pikara Magazine (Basque Country) interviewed a millennial Palestinian vegan activist, and the head of an animal rights NGO, who said there should be justice not only for Palestinian humans but also for animals, insects, and “sentient creatures” in Palestine. In 2022, an Intercept Magazine article called for ending "Weed Apartheid" In Palestine. Obviously, a real program for liberation was replaced by a Palestinian avant-garde libidinal and cultural “acid trip” to the “Land of Oranges and Lemons,” a romantic post-patriarchal melting pot in historical Palestine. This fantasy gave the Palestinian youth an escape from the economic, military, and political complexities of the Palestinian question.
Meanwhile, there were never safeguards against Woke anti-Zionism becoming more “woke” than “anti-Zionist”; rather, this movement began to sync with other forms of politically correct imperialist projects that proliferated during the Obama and Biden eras. PMC anti-conservatism naturally has an anti-majority bias, this generates contradictions in how we define “intersectionality” or “diversity” in Western versus Middle Eastern contexts. In the US, Muslims are a protected minority under the intersectional umbrella of the Democratic Party. But in most Arab countries, the majority does consist of “cisgender moderately-conservative Arab males”, the demographic that was racially profiled and targeted as dangerous during George Bush’s War on Terror. If even Donald Rumsfield was candid about his war being against the unknown future, then both the social justice “war on prejudice” and the capitalist state’s “war on terror” have similar defects in their epistemological make-up; both create the illusion of an existential enemy and a metaphysical threat existing outside of capitalism, more dangerous than capitalism itself.
What makes things more complicated, is the fact that the Palestinian diversity revolution was only peripheral to the main and central Middle Eastern middle-class social justice revolution in Lebanon, which took place in the aftermath of the Lebanese revolution after October 17, 2019, when massive anti-corruption protests demanded the overthrow of the traditional political class (still firmly in place). This revolution would also eventually import the apolitical business model of the American culture war. Hence, woke identity politics became a major theme of the Lebanese revolution, alongside an anti-conservative hostility towards Islamist populism and towards the so-called Axis of Resistance, a hostility that lacked a nuanced and sober reading of a geopolitical situation shaped by the US containment policy against Iran.
This engendered the rise of a novel Arab alternative academia and media class, which is hostile to Palestinian anti-colonialism because, as Syrian academic Fadi Abu Deeb indicates, it contradicts in its entirety with the individualistic-entrepreneurial narrative of this new Arab Homo Economicus, who has a post-ideological uncritical faith in the (already failing) Western Capitalism, similar to the Soviet dissidents of Cold War fanfare and anti-Nasser Egyptian dissidents in the 1960s like Yussef Samir, who defected from Egypt and worked for Radio Israel (with the major difference of “podcasting” having replaced “broadcasting”). Under the banner of “breaking traditional taboos”, viral Lebanese podcasts with millions of views would interview a queer activist in one episode and an openly Arab Zionist in the next episode. That political (or anti-political) climate ended up accommodating part of the set for the inauguration of the Abraham Normalization Accords between the Arab Gulf States and Israel in 2020. Woke anti-Zionists seemed incapable of halting that tide.
Another tidal wave that the Palestinian progressive PMC failed to counter was the American-Israeli genocide unleashed upon Gaza after October 7, paradoxically, by a US administration that claimed to fight for “DEI” and “the oppressed of the world”, an administration that made the criticism of its tokenized Muslims at home politically incorrect, while making the blatant murder of Muslims abroad the new normal.
While the left succeeded in diversifying anti-Zionism, it failed — maybe even forgot — to overcome Zionism. This failure of the social justice movement came because of its apolitical moralist worldview, which first appealed to the Western NGO system by promoting a view of Palestinians as the helpless victims of Israel — and the Palestinian patriarchy — before contradicting itself when the time came to justify the Palestinian predisposition for anti-colonial violent resistance. Among pro-Palestine activists in this current war, there were more incoherent “Judith Butlers” than coherent and confident “John Mearsheimers”.
Wokeness, or reactionary anti-conservatism, both in Zionism and anti-Zionism and within other manifestations of PMC progressivism, is based on what Marx called idealism in The German Ideology. But among these applicants for liberal sympathies, only progressive Zionism erects a pinkwashing façade for neoconservative efforts to reshape the Middle East and actually has the realist material capabilities to do so. Palestinian social justice idealism, however, does not rely on the same bedrock of support and can't survive in the real world, let alone enforce a ceasefire or an arms embargo. The feuds between woke and anti-woke are designed for us to keep confronting each other, instead of successfully confronting Empire. No amount of anti-racist and queer activism for Palestine would change — or sweeten — that bitter absence.
This article was edited with the generous help of our friend and comrade Arturo Desimone
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