When Forster officially announced Seven Shoulders and its premise on Twitter/X, he was skewered on all sides. White people disguising themselves as black is passé and will provoke offence and indignation whatever the reason may be. Many black people, in particular, responded negatively because they felt that they were the best qualified to discuss the reality of being black. They also felt that they didn’t need a white Canadian man to don a synthetic afro wig, wear coloured contact lenses, and put on brown-coloured Maybelline foundation (specifically, mocha shade—because ‘I figured it was best not to get too ambitious’) to find out whether racism still exists in America. 

Forster follows in the footsteps of other ‘journalistic blackface’ practitioners, on whose example he rests very heavily: he cites Ray Sprigle, John Howard Griffin, author of 1967’s Black Like Me (which he particularly admires), and Grace Halsell, author of 1969’s Soul Sister. All of them went incognito as ‘black’ to try to enlighten a largely ignorant and indifferent white America on the reality of the pervasive racism faced by black Americans, whether under the oppressive Jim Crow apartheid regime of the South in the 20^th century or the unofficial but ubiquitous racism that black communities endured across Northern cities during the same period.

Even though journalistic blackface has already been done three times, Forster ‘felt [he] had no choice’ but to anoint himself as the heir to this tradition. Moreover, he proclaims that he is sui generis because he is ‘the first person to earnestly cross the color barrier in over half a century’—and he is especially unique because he is the first person to do so in a post-Rodney King, post-Barack Obama, and post-George Floyd America. This claim isn’t strictly true, as there have been reality TV shows from this century setting up social experiments where whites have been disguised as blacks and vice versa to see what life is like ‘on the other side’ of the racial divide. 

Nevertheless, Forster doesn’t advertise Seven Shoulders as a moralistic screed. Instead, it’s a book that ‘prioritises methodical language and comprehensive analysis over emotional fervour and moral condemnation’ and he is the right person for this task because he is ‘inclined to describe rather than admonish.’

Unlike Ray Sprigle, who ‘ate, slept, traveled, lived Black’ (‘I lodged in Negro households. I ate in Negro restaurants. I slept in Negro hotels and lodging houses. I crept through the back and side doors of railroad stations’), Forster doesn’t embed himself within predominantly black communities. He doesn’t attempt to live a social life as a black man. No, the way Forster seeks to ‘taxonomize’ American racism (which, he says, can be divided into various categories, including two oft-conflated ones: ‘macro-level racial disparities’ and ‘institutional injustice’) is to pose as a hitchhiker on the sides, or shoulders, of seven different roads across the US, ‘first as a White man, and then again as a Black man on the following day.’

He claims this hitchhiking experiment is an accurate way to ‘taxonomize’ contemporary racism in America because it ‘exposes real sentiments that might otherwise be concealed… It reveals how [Americans] act when nobody is telling them how to act.’ It reveals another category of racism: the ‘interpersonal’ type.

The problem with this is that this isn’t the America of the Beatniks, where hitchhiking culture was a lot more prominent than it is today. And it is rather shallow to make sweeping judgements on a topic as broad and intricate as race in America on the sole basis of a limited hitchhiking experiment—which is why the pompous statements peppered throughout the book are so jarring. For instance:

[N]obody has an experiential barometer with respect to race… nobody except for me… [You] may say that I haven’t lived enough Black life for my barometer to be useful. Say what you will. My barometer is better than anyone else’s. 

Or: 

I am a visionary writer who wants to demystify race in a way that is creative, compelling, and beautiful.

For all the vim and haughty rhetoric Forster deploys, Seven Shoulders is as underwhelming as it is superficial. This is disappointing in its own way, as I was slightly intrigued by the premise. Instead, I encountered a book that was confused and incoherently written. Publishing a chapter that actually contains the line ‘I don’t know what I’m supposed to say in this chapter’ doesn’t exactly instil confidence in you as a writer, ‘visionary’ or otherwise.

Though the journalistic blackface was unnecessary, not to mention silly, there might perhaps have been an interesting, if provocative, book investigating the textures and dynamics of race in America in the 21^st century from a considered first-person view. Ray Sprigle and John Howard Griffin in their ethnographical studies at least spoke to black Americans and collected testimonies of their experiences of racism. The closest Forster comes to anything like this is a pedestrian interview with two unnamed black politicians (whom he interviewed as a white man) who were clearly unaware of what project their remarks were lent to. 

Most of the commentary surrounding Seven Shoulders has focused on Forster’s use of blackface and thus the gravamen has been missed. He claims that in America today, instances of institutional racism are ‘extremely [he repeats this word over several pages in case you didn’t get it the first time—yes, really]…difficult to identify, and outward demonstrations of interpersonal racism are also a vanishing phenomenon.’ 

This thesis very much rhymes with that of Dinesh D’Souza’s 1995 book The End of Racism and other arguments from American conservatives. In other words, Forster isn’t as original and avant-garde as his bumptious pronouncements would have us believe. Forster concedes that what he calls ‘shoulder racism’, based on what we might call unconscious bias, might occur in certain circumstances—but says that it is not a pressing social problem.

He also notes that he was perceived differently by the homeless when he was white compared to when he was black: he was constantly asked for money by homeless people (of whatever colour) as a white man, yet he wasn’t pestered by anyone for money as a black man, which I find believable. But that is the extent of the depth he arrives at when contemplating how whites and blacks may be perceived differently within society. 

Whatever your opinion on whether Ray Sprigle, John Howard Griffin, and Grace Halsell were ever justified in engaging in journalistic blackface, one cannot deny that, in service of the cause of racial equality, they made sincere efforts to understand the reality of the racism that plagued their time. In contrast, Forster’s efforts in Seven Shoulders are an unserious and not even entertaining attempt at gonzo journalism. It feels like it was written in an unhinged frenzy, without any serious understanding of the complicated subject it broaches, and it makes bold claims and states tendentious conclusions based on a flimsy ‘experiment’ that a bad YouTuber could conduct.

As a black man—technically mixed race—I’m not even offended. I have thick skin and a broad back, so it takes a lot to make me cry. Besides, to be offended or hurt by Sam Forster’s gimmick I would have had to have taken it seriously. I do agree with Forster that most of the books currently written about race, whether by blacks or whites, are ‘tremendously boring.’ Alas, his is the latest addition to that pile. 

Related reading

Race: the most difficult subject of all? Interview with Inaya Folarin Iman by Emma Park

Two types of ‘assimilation’: the US and China, by Grayson Slover

The Enlightenment and the making of modernity, by Piers Benn

Linnaeus, Buffon, and the battle for biology, by Charles Foster

‘The best way to combat bad speech is with good speech’ – interview with Maryam Namazie, by Emma Park

Young, radical and morally confused, by Gerfried Ambrosch

Can sentientism save the world? Interview with Jamie Woodhouse, by Emma Park

David Tennant, Kemi Badenoch, and the ugly sin of identity politics: a view from the right, by Frank Haviland

The post Gimmick journalism and race in America: review of ‘Seven Shoulders’ by Sam Forster appeared first on The Freethinker.

Deep within the series of notebooks that make up his Foundations of a Critique of Political Economy, Karl Marx prophetically argued that the dynamic and intense technological development that occurred in capitalist society would culminate in an:

‘automatic system of machinery…set in motion by an automaton, a moving power that moves itself; this automaton consisting of numerous mechanical and intellectual organs, so that the workers themselves are cast merely as its conscious linkages.’

What Marx is describing is essentially what we now call artificial intelligence (AI)—a subject that long ago ceased to be esoteric, discussed only among a small number of computer scientists. It is now a mainstay of public discussion, and the argument over its implications for society tends to be framed either in terms of utopias or dystopias.  

On the one hand, techno-utopians will lean on the potential of AI to boost innovation and economic growth and aid humanity in solving the complex problems it faces, from disease and poverty to climate change. Catastrophists, on the other hand, imagine us to be on the cusp of a Westworld or Cyberpunk 2077-like world where a sentient and conscious AI rebels against its human creators to oppress and ultimately eliminate them—a motif that has been a staple in science fiction from Fritz Lang’s 1927 silent film Metropolis onwards. 

In her new book Human Rights, Robot Wrongs: Being Human in the Age of AI, leading human rights barrister Susie Alegre, whilst not a total catastrophist, is certainly no AI utopian. She argues that the rapid development of AI technology is a threat to human rights, whether in the form of robo-judges and robo-lawyers undermining the principle of the right to a fair trial, ‘killer robots’ (which she proposes banning) violating the right to life, or sex robots potentially subverting customs around consent and freedom from manipulation. All of these, Alegre posits, encourage the delusion that machines are infallible and objective and thus should be allowed to bypass human accountability, even for decisions which take lives. Her basic thesis is that we are in danger of embracing this technology without sufficient regulation, all for the aggrandisement of the nefarious corporations behind it. 

More crucially, over-embracing AI will undermine key elements of the human condition, even when it is proposed as a solution to a social problem. For instance, the increased use of chatbots by therapists to deal with depression and loneliness would actually compound isolation and alienation. Alegre cites the case of a Belgian man who committed suicide after an intense six-week relationship with an AI chatbot because it was fundamentally a synthetic replacement for authentic human relationships. No matter how sophisticated—even if it can mimic human reason and present a simulacrum of human emotion—a machine cannot actually replace the human elements that we need. Thus, Alegre says, ‘by looking for humanity in the machines, we risk losing sight of our own humanity.’

Alegre adeptly discusses a wide range of topics involving AI and shows that under our current arrangements, AI is not being used to harmonise global production or enhance humanity’s creativity but to discipline workers (and dispense with even more of them), undermine artistic imagination, and increase the power and profit margins of corporations, among other negatives. Still, Human Rights, Robot Wrongs does read as incredibly biased against technological development and at times resorts to the use of hyperbole. The use of ChatGPT to help craft a eulogy at a funeral shows AI being ‘deployed to exploit death’, Alegre writes, while using AI in art and music may mean ‘we lose what it means to be human entirely.’ She neglects to mention that AI can help artists come up with prototypes and proofs of concept which, while lacking the special human touch, can be used by artists to develop new ideas. Though Alegre does concede that AI can be used for good, such as it being used to unlock hidden words in a burnt scroll from ancient Rome or helping to restore missing pieces of a Rembrandt masterpiece, she still views its potential as something that ought to be contained rather than unleashed, lest it colonise the authentic human experience.

This is why, for all of Alegre’s talk of human rights, her book implicitly presents a very diminished notion of human agency. Regulation becomes less a way by which society can collectively shape its relationship with AI and other new technologies and more something that is imposed from on high, from institutions such as the European Court of Human Rights, as a means of protecting helpless humans from the machines. 

The problem with this kind of techno-negativism is its determinism, which downplays the fact that society is really what mediates and determines technological development. From the moment the power of fire was discovered, humans have created new technologies and adapted them to their needs. These technologies have allowed humanity to achieve the previously unthinkable and cultivate new needs—that is, to go beyond what was previously thought possible for human lives. 

In contrast to such apprehensive and even dark views of technology, Vasily Grossman’s magisterial 1959 novel Life and Fate was ahead of its time in offering a different, more positive vision of humanity and technology. Despite setting the novel in (and writing it in the aftermath of) the industrial charnel house that was the Eastern Front during the Second World War—among the most barbaric and apocalyptic episodes in the history of civilisation, and one made possible by the most advanced technology of the time—Grossman’s faith in humanity and technological progress remained adamantine.

Grossman already lived in a world in which an ‘electronic machine’ could ‘solve mathematical problems more quickly than man’. And he was able to imagine ‘the machine of future ages and millennia’, seeing that what we call AI is something that could elevate humanity to new summits rather than be antagonistic to it. Indeed, it would be something capable of expressing the whole human condition:

‘Childhood memories … tears of happiness … the bitterness of parting … love of freedom … feelings of pity for a sick puppy … nervousness … a mother’s tenderness … thoughts of death … sadness … friendship … love of the weak … sudden hope … a fortunate guess … melancholy … unreasoning joy … sudden embarrassment …’ 

We are nowhere near producing the kind of AI Grossman describes here. That would require more processing power and energy than we currently produce, and a different and more advanced society capable of producing it. Technology is not the problem; the question is how the society that produces and uses that technology is organised. Right now, AI is an instrument of iniquitous corporations chasing their surplus value and seems antagonistic to everything valuable in the human experience. But under different arrangements, there is no reason why it could not be an instrument of emancipation and human flourishing. 

Alegre is right to say that AI ‘needs to serve rather than subvert our humanity’, but to achieve this will require a transformation of our social organisation. We will have to move away from our current form of social organisation, which valorises big corporations interested in innovation only to the extent that it benefits the power of capital, and towards one based fundamentally on human flourishing. Then, how technology is mediated in and by society will be transformed, and our society will be one where man is truly and self-consciously the master of the machine. But that would require something more radical than Alegre’s neo-Luddism. 

Further reading

‘Nobody really understands what the consequences are’: Susie Alegre on how digital technology undermines free thought, interview by Emma Park

Ethical future? Science fiction and the tech billionaires, by Rahman Toone

Artificial intelligence and algorithmic bias on Islam, by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

The post The end of the world as we know it? Review of Susie Alegre’s ‘Human Rights, Robot Wrongs: Being Human in the Age of AI’ appeared first on The Freethinker.

There is a pattern that usually occurs when a senior politician resigns or is chucked out of their job. First comes the emotion-laden speech, during which they will wax lyrical about the privilege of serving in public office. Second, the much-needed sabbatical, where they can spend time with the spouses and families they have barely seen since they were elected. And lastly, the lucrative deal with a publisher to write and publish the memoir of their time in office. 

The political memoir is the most sordid literary genre out there. Disgraced and failed politicians are given exorbitant advances by publishers to write, or have written for them, mediocre and self-serving memoirs that few within the public will read—or have even the faintest desire to read. The memoir is the ultimate payday for the disgraced politician who has to put themselves out there in the market again to secure their professional future. A memoir ought to be fascinating, insightful, even moving. It should give readers an insight into the character and personality of the person behind the public persona, as well as just telling the author’s side of the story. And, of course, political memoirs should reveal the inner workings of politics: the backroom deals, the sandbagging, and the scandals. Except, most of the time, such memoirs are public relations exercises in which insight is scarce and cheap score-settling is rife. Their authors usually care only about downplaying their failures and claiming they were misunderstood and undervalued all along.

‘This book is not a traditional political memoir,’ opens Liz Truss in her recently released contribution to the genre, Ten Years to Save the West. In one way, she is correct: this isn’t a typical political memoir, since Truss received a paltry £1,500 advance compared to the £500,000 and £1,000,000 advances that Boris Johnson and David Cameron received, respectively, for their memoirs. In other ways, it is all too typical. Truss’s retelling of her 49-day stint as Prime Minister is narcissistic, with the usual pointless score-settling, whether against Nick Clegg or Polly Toynbee. Moreover, there is virtually no self-reflection and she indulges in a nauseating amount of self-pity. 

‘Saving Western civilisation’ has been a sub-genre unto itself, especially on the right, for a long time, and Truss has ticked all the usual genre conventions. Truss argues that ‘the West has lost its way’ and long since become ‘decadent’ and ‘complacent’; the education system has been colonised by  ‘wokeism’, making us hate our own heritage; big business is enthralled by ‘“wokenomics,” where they are more focused on so-called environmental, social and governance objectives than making money’; and anti-capitalist leftists and environmentalists with their Net Zero obsession threaten future prospects of economic growth and progress. She doesn’t forget to name-drop Michel Foucault as supposedly being the godfather of identity politics, even though anyone who seriously knows anything about Foucault would understand that he saw identity politics as a form of ‘essentialism’—i.e. turning something that is a social and cultural construct into an ontology—and opposed it for that reason. 

If that wasn’t bad enough, Prime Minister Truss was going to stop the rot and save the West with a radical programme of supply-side economics but was undermined and overthrown by the ‘economic establishment’, the administrative state, and her rivals within the Tory party who didn’t accept her as leader. 

The subtitle of the book is ‘leading the revolution against globalism, socialism, and the liberal establishment’, which clearly shows that she is trying to pivot to a radical right audience. Yet this new animus towards globalism is a baffling triangulation. For most of her career, Truss has been advocating for what many would call a neoliberal form of capitalism. She was originally for the UK staying in the European Union. Even when she became a Brexiteer, it was so that Britain would become more ‘global’. She has always been a partisan of free trade. As Prime Minister, she even moved to liberalise immigration rules to grant more VISAs to newcomers. In her memoir, she defends her policy ideas, from education to the economy, by saying that she wanted to make Britain more ‘competitive’ in the global marketplace.  

On foreign policy, she is a thorough Atlanticist. She is firm in her support for arming Ukraine against Russian aggression, advocates a ‘restoration of British and American exceptionalism’, and wants to see a new  ‘coalition of the willing’ against rogue states such as China, Iran, and Russia. Isn’t this Atlanticism an example of the globalism that her desired allies on the radical right would detest? 

When Truss calls herself a ‘conservative’, she really means that she supports a conservative form of liberalism: low taxes, free trade, and the downsizing of the state against progressive liberalism, which is based on higher taxes and more state intervention in the economy. What she seeks to ‘conserve’ is the post-Cold War world order based on Anglo-American hegemony that has been in crisis for the past decade. This isn’t the radical, anti-establishment politics she portrays herself as representing. 

For someone who is supposed to be an avid defender of capitalism against anti-capitalist leftists, she doesn’t get how much of the big government and the administrative state that she lambasts is actually essential to the functioning and management of capital accumulation and the capitalist system as a whole. What she calls ‘socialism’—overbearing statism that intervenes invasively in people’s lives—is already served up to us by contemporary capitalism. Think, for example, of the ‘nanny state’, so detested by Truss. You don’t have to be a Marxist to understand this point. 

Truss’s chief complaint about her failed tenure as premier is that unelected officials and bureaucrats failed to respect her mandate. This only begs the question: what mandate? She wasn’t voted in democratically by the British public, nor was she even supported by most Conservative MPs in her bid to take over after the implosion of the Boris Johnson administration. Truss became Prime Minister because she was selected by the Tory membership in an internal, closed-off party contest. Then she banked on the markets instead of the British public to support her programme and the markets did her in. That’s the entire story of her premiership (admittedly, it wouldn’t make for a very long or a very interesting memoir). 

Ten Years to Save the West is the work of a failed politician whose historical legacy will be the unprecedented shortness of her premiership. She is now pivoting to the next stage of her career and trying her luck as an anti-establishment populist. Except she is repackaging very established ideas as ‘radical’ and ‘anti-establishment’. It is true that Western economies have been in a rut and that we desperately need a radical programme to generate more wealth and greatly improve people’s standards of living. But we didn’t need Liz Truss to tell us that. She was never the saviour of the West. Her policy ideas did not have democratic legitimacy and would not have worked. While Britain is still not in a good way politically and economically, it is no worse off than if Liz Truss was still in power—or had never existed at all.

Further reading

‘This rebarbative profession’ – Rory Stewart’s ‘Politics on the Edge’, reviewed, by Daniel James Sharp

The post Liz Truss, the nobody PM: review of ‘Ten Years to Save the West’ appeared first on The Freethinker.

What role does religion play in the Israel-Palestine conflict? Two contrasting views have recently appeared in the pages of the Freethinker. Kunwar Khuldune Shahid argued that ‘[a]t the heart of the ongoing conflict…is the fact that different religious groups are claiming exclusive control over much of the same territory’. Meanwhile, the liberal imam Taj Hargey took the opposite view in an interview with Freethinker editor Emma Park: ‘[T]he root cause of this conflict is not between Islam and Judaism, between Muslims and Jews, but between Zionist colonial settlers and the legitimate Palestinian resistance. That is the fight.’

The land where so much blood is currently being needlessly spilled is the Holy Land, sacred to the faithful of all three major Abrahamic religions, who exalt it within their respective spiritual and theological practices and traditions. Moreover, religious fundamentalists on both sides—whether in the hard right Israeli government and the fanatical religious Zionist settler movement or the Islamist outfits of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ)—continually invoke their sacred texts to justify their exclusive rights to the Holy Land. There is also a great deal of sensitivity when it comes to the use of religious sites like the Temple Mount/al-Aqsa. Given all this, it would be naïve to disregard the important part religion plays in this conflict—and it is easy to see why, in the face of such zealotry, one might see it as nothing more than a religious dispute.

Fundamentally, however, the Israel-Palestine conflict is not a holy war. Its roots lie not in supposed ancient hatreds or Quranic enmities but in modern and secular conditions. In essence, I would argue that the conflict is not, as Shahid claims, about different religious groups fighting for exclusive control of the same territory. Rather, it is a quarrel between two nations of roughly equal size—one Hebrew-speaking and predominantly (though not exclusively) Jewish, and one Arabic-speaking and predominantly Muslim, but with a significant and influential Christian minority—over who should be the undisputed master of the whole land.

In the original 1964 charter of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), the words ‘Arab’, ‘Palestinian’, ‘homeland’ and ‘nationalism’ form a consistent motif. It does not refer much to religion, except in vague and ecumenical terms – in contrast, Hamas’ 1988 charter is replete with religious references. Moreover, in the 1970s and 1980s, the most prominent Palestinian nationalist outfit after Yasser Arafat’s Fatah was the ostensibly Marxist-Leninist (though ‘Stalinist’ would be a more apt description) Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). Founded by George Habash, who came from a Christian background, many of the PFLP’s members were very secular-minded; many were even avowed atheists. It is mostly forgotten now, but when Hamas first arose in the 1980s, they would frequently clash with PFLP members, who they condemned as ‘apostates’. At that time, Israel, playing at the old imperial game of divide and rule, also implicitly backed Hamas, seeing it as a conservative counterweight to secular Palestinian groups.

The goal of leftist Palestinian nationalism is one secular democratic socialist state. This has been criticised as a Trojan horse for Arab ethnonationalist domination, but even if this was true, it would be an ethnonational, not religious, domination. It was only in 2003, under Arafat’s autocratic rule, that the constitution of the Palestinian Authority was amended to proclaim that Islam was to be the sole official religion of Palestine and sharia was to be ‘a principal source of legislation’.

On the other side, the founders of the Zionist movement, from Moses Hess to Theodor Herzl to David Ben Gurion, were, likewise, extremely secular, even anti-religious. ‘We shall keep our priests within the confines of their temples’, Herzl wrote in his infamous cri de coeur, Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State) in 1896. Zionism originated in 19^th-century romantic nationalism. It understood the Jewish predicament in a very particular sense. Jews were a nation in the abnormal condition of being the ‘stranger par excellence’, as the Russian Zionist Leon Pinsker put it in 1882: ‘They home everywhere, but are nowhere at home … [T]hey are everywhere aliens … [and] everywhere endangered’. Therefore the answer to the so-called Jewish question was to create a Jewish national home that would morph into a Jewish state in what they saw as the organic homeland of the Jews: Eretz Israel/Palestine.

Whether it advocated for a Jewish nation-state or a Jewish socialist commonwealth, early Zionist thought made its claims not in the name of the Jewish faith, but of the Jewish people.

Zionists heartily invoked traditional Jewish mythology and the Hebrew language, but these were subordinated to their project of national renewal. Among the first and most ardent opponents of Zionism were religious Jews who railed against the Zionist prescription of a Jewish state as a blasphemy against the Torah; in their eyes, only the Messiah (who was, as yet, still tarrying) could establish a true Jewish state. As the Israeli philosopher Micah Goodman has put it, ‘[S]ome of the main Zionist thinkers saw Zionism as a Jewish revolt against Judaism.’

Many Palestinians and Arabs find the notion of Jewish nationhood hard to swallow. To them, Judaism is just a religion; it does not denote a nation or a people. This position is also expressed in the PLO charter: ‘Judaism because it is a divine religion is not a nationality with independent existence. Furthermore the Jews are not one people with an independent personality…’ To acknowledge the secular fact of Jewish peoplehood and the depth of the historic and cultural attachment to Eretz Israel would be, to them, tantamount to legitimising Zionism, and, thus, the mass displacement and dispossession of the Palestinian Arabs in 1948 and onwards. The Israeli state’s own lack of clarity as to whether it sees Jewishness in either ethnic or religious terms exacerbates this confusion.

Zionism is not particularly unique in using religion as the external badge of nationhood. One can find a parallel (as Shahid astutely notes) in the Pakistani nationalist movement. Muhammad Ali Jinnah, its founding father, was firmly irreligious, and he argued that the Muslim population of South Asia was a particular nation that could not live as a minority under an India where the Hindu ‘nation’ was the majority. Therefore, Muslims required their own state.

Understanding the national foundation of the conflict means having a more nuanced understanding of the enmity towards Israel. Shahid claims that Islamic anti-Semitism is the ‘predominant motivation behind Muslim animosity towards Israel’. No doubt there is an element of truth to this. Religiously-motivated anti-Semitism has proliferated across many Muslim countries, as Hina Husain, for instance, has described in an article on her Pakistani upbringing. For jihadists like Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, opposition to Israel really is about ‘Muslim imperialism’, as Shahid puts it. They do not care about Palestinian nationhood; for them, Palestine is nothing more than a province in a lost empire that they wish to resurrect.

But it would be wrong to see all Arab opposition to Israel as a result of eternal anti-Semitism. The Palestinian Arab enmity towards Israel, in particular, is rooted in the concrete reality of what Zionism in practice has meant for them: the takeover of their land by newcomers, guarded by an external imperial power, to create a new political order that they would be excluded from, thus necessitating their extirpation. In other words, settler colonialism.

‘The fear of territorial displacement and dispossession was to be the chief motor of Arab antagonism to Zionism down to 1948 (& indeed after 1967 as well)’, observed the Israeli historian Benny Morris in his book Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-2001. This antagonism would have been present whatever the identity of their dispossessors—because it is a rational and materially-based antagonism, rather than a result of hideous prejudice. This is not to say that genuine prejudice has not emerged among Palestinian Arabs, just that not all of their opposition to Israel can be dismissed as such.

In this sense, Taj Hargey is right to make his parallel with settler colonialism. But this point, rather en vogue at the moment, needs more nuance. Zionism is a peculiar form of settler colonialism, because it was also a national movement of an immensely persecuted people, who were not regarded as ‘of’ European civilisation. The means of settler colonisation were used to attain the end of an independent ethnonationalist state, and the Palestinians paid the price for that.

It is also true that in recent decades, the conflict has acquired a more overtly religious character. On the one hand, we have seen the rise of religious Zionism, culminating in the ascension to power of the increasingly sectarian Benjamin Netanyahu, and, on the other, the ‘degeneration of Palestinian Arab nationalism into the theocratic and thanatocratic hell of Hamas and Islamic Jihad’ (as Christopher Hitchens put it in 2008). But even this does not negate the national basis of the conflict. It complements it. Nationalism, like religion, can be extremely irrational; it too can create ahistorical ‘sacred’ mythologies and inspire all sorts of horrors.

In essence, the Israel-Palestine question is partially an issue of settler colonialism and partially an unresolved national question. Religion is an exacerbating, toxifying factor. With the parties of God holding a veto—and exercising it liberally—over any peaceful settlement, religion has made the conflict even more intractable. One has to understand all of these dimensions as part of a whole to truly grasp the nature of the conflict.

It has become a truism to describe the Israel-Palestine conflict as ‘complex’, defying simplistic narratives. Certain things, though, such as the atrocities perpetrated by Hamas/PIJ commandos on 7 October, or the obscene bombardment Israel has inflicted on Gaza since that date, or the tyrannical Israeli occupation of the West Bank, are, however, very simple to understand and easy to take a clear position on. Still, this conflict demands a subtle yet principled approach that forthrightly opposes all racist chauvinism and religious demagoguery, whatever form it might take. Standing Together is a great civil society initiative within Israel, organised by Jews and Palestinian Arabs, seeking to promote Arab-Jewish solidarity and opposing both the occupation and extremism on all sides. This is a movement that any humanist could and should support.

Edward Said’s remark that the Palestinians are the ‘victims of the victims’ encapsulates much of the emotional intricacy underlying the conflict. In the 2015 novel The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen, which concerns itself with another protracted and deadly war, there is a passage that also sums up for me the tragedy of the Israel-Palestine conflict: ‘As Hegel said, tragedy was not the conflict between right and wrong but right and right, a dilemma none of us who wanted to participate in history could escape.’ The scars of the Israel-Palestine calamity are very deep. They will not be healed any time soon. But the fact remains: Jews and Arabs are tied to a common future in the Holy Land—a land which both belong to. The task of creating a common civic society, in which both can live as free people on a free land, may be arduous. But that does not make it any less necessary.

The post Is the Israel-Palestine conflict fundamentally a nationalist, not a religious, war? appeared first on The Freethinker.