Communists for Hamas

Six months on from the horrors of October 7, with all the death, destruction and suffering that has followed, it is still shocking to find someone arguing that Hamas’s attack on Israel that day was not merely understandable, or justifiable, but actually inspiring. It is even more shocking - or should be, but we’ll come to that - when the writer in question is a politics professor; but that’s what the left wing publisher Verso Books published on their blog this week.

Jodi Dean is a professor at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in the United States, and she found the sight of Hamas paragliders flying from Gaza into southern Israel on that fateful morning “exhilarating.” “Who could not feel energized seeing oppressed people bulldozing the fences enclosing them, taking to the skies in escape, and flying freely through the air?”, she asks. These were “moments of freedom” that “made it seem as if anyone could be free”. She writes as if all those Hamas gunmen jumped in their paragliders and flew south, to Egypt, or west, over the Mediterranean, in an audacious bid to escape the misery of life in Gaza. But they didn’t: they flew east, into Israel, to kill and rape. Dean doesn’t mention that.

She does mention that Hamas did this knowing “of the devastation that would follow”; but Dean does not have in mind the devastation in the kibbutzim where Hamas slaughtered hundreds of Israelis, burning them in their homes and shooting them down in cold blood. Only the devastation in Gaza merits a mention here.

It was not uncommon to find left wing academics struggling to contain their excitement on October 7, but the despair of the last six months has not dimmed Dean’s enthusiasm for that day, nor her personal identification with what Hamas did. “When we witness such actions many of us also feel this sense of openness”, Dean wrote, but “Imperialism tries to shut these feelings down before they spread too far.” There is something laughable about a tenured professor at a north American college writing as if she, too, is trapped in some dystopian warzone, rather than enjoying a level of freedom unmatched throughout much of the world today. Dean is a member of a small Communist party in the United States - the Party for Socialism and Liberation - and there is, ironically, something quite bourgeois about a person who enjoys all the comforts of professorial life in the United States escaping their mundanity by fantasising about being a Hamas fighter flying to freedom.

The paragliders have become a symbol of Hamas since October 7; three women were recently convicted of support for a proscribed terrorist group after sticking pictures of them to their backpacks at one of the large protests in London. They captured the imagination of many of Hamas’s admirers, but the politics behind Dean’s dreams run much deeper. Even by the standards of the anti-Israel left, she is especially wholehearted in her support for Hamas and castigates other leftists for their squeamishness over Hamas’s methods. The person on the left who Dean highlights as failing this challenge is none other than Judith Butler, who famously described Hamas and Hizbollah as “social movements that are progressive, that are on the left, that are part of a global left” in 2006. But Butler condemned the scale and nature of Hamas’s barbarism on October 7, and that makes her a counter-revolutionary in Dean’s eyes. Even worse, she writes, are those on the pro-Palestinian left who prefer humanitarian work to militant struggle: they betray the cause by accepting the moralism that rejects Hamas’s brutality.

Dean’s point is simple: since Hamas lead the struggle for Palestinian liberation the Western left ought to support them unconditionally. This is not only because Dean believes Palestinians have the right to fight against Israel however they choose, but because she believes Hamas are fighting “for all of us” in the “global struggle against imperialism.” Ultimately, Dean’s article is just the latest version of an argument that sees the Palestinian struggle as the spearhead of anti-capitalist revolution the world over. It’s an essay-length version of all those “Globalise the Intifada” chants.

This thinking has its roots in the 1960s, when Marxist and Trotskyist movements in the West resigned themselves to the fact that the Western working class was never going to live up to their revolutionary dreams, and transferred that hope instead onto the liberation movements of the Global South (or Third World, as it was called at the time). This was the fundamental shift that led so many on the left to throw in their lot with some of the most reactionary, oppressive and vicious movements around the world, as long as they were fighting against “imperialism”. It owed much to the writings of Frantz Fanon, an Algerian psychotherapist and political writer whose two best-known books, Black Skin, White Masks (published in 1952) and The Wretched of the Earth (1961) had great influence on radical left-wing thought in Europe and North America. Fanon viewed all colonisers and colonised as absolute categories that cannot be bridged, and wrote that violence to remove colonisers should not be regretted as an unfortunate necessity, but welcomed as “a cleansing force” that “frees the native from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction; it makes him fearless and restores his self-respect.”

Dean, too, sees Hamas’s violence as necessary and calls on the Western left to back it. “Defending Hamas”, she writes, “we take the side of the Palestinian resistance… Which side are you on? Liberation or Zionism and imperialism? There are two sides and no alternative, no negotiation of the relation between oppressor and oppressed.”

This doesn’t leave much room for a peace process, or any vision of a peaceful, shared future for Palestinians and Israelis. But that doesn’t matter when you are writing from the vantage point of an academic seat in New York State, because for Dean and others of similar mind this isn’t really a conflict over Israel and Palestine, but a struggle for the entire future of humanity. When Western leftists claim that “we are all Palestinians”, she writes, this is not “sentimental identification” but “the political slogan of radical universal emancipation.”

You might think Hamas is as unsuitable a vehicle for universal emancipation as you’ll find, given their opposition to gender equality, LGBT+ rights, freedom of, or from, religion, and the rest. Indeed, much has been written about how leftists can possibly support Islamists, when their values and programmes are so fundamentally different (Dean claims that “Hamas is supported by the entirety of the organized Palestinian left”; ” I guess that depends on how you define the left). But that’s beside the point. If the future of the world is at stake and revolution is within reach, all sorts of things can be compromised.

There may be something else going on here too. For centuries, the role and standing of Jews in the world has been given symbolic status well beyond their numbers or actual importance, and this has often revolved around questions of freedom. Even in ancient times, according to David Nirenberg, an ideology had already taken form “that represented the struggle against tyranny in terms of a struggle against the Jews.” When Western leftists like Jodi Dean place Israel and Gaza at the vanguard of global anti-imperialism it can sometimes feel like just the latest iteration of this tradition of thought.

It’s worth remembering all of this when asking why this conflict energises so many people, with the potency to bring hundreds of thousands onto the streets of Western cities and sustain a protest movement for months on end - a movement often organised and led, in part, by people from the radical left. We usually try to answer this via a series of rational, measurable factors: the awful loss of life and destruction in Gaza, the humanitarian crisis, the role of Western arms and political support for Israel, the history of Western colonialism and the ongoing occupation - that kind of thing. However, this alone cannot explain why Israel stirs such passions but a host of other conflicts and crises that contain some or all of those same features, sometimes at much greater magnitude, barely move the dial of sympathy or activism amongst Western progressives. Understanding why people protest over Gaza is easy; explaining the discrepancy between that and the absence of protest elsewhere is the problem, and that is where these fantasies of liberation and revolution come in to play.