PaulMasonOnDecolonization

Simon Sebag Montefiore's attack on decolonisation theory (The Atlantic, 27 October 2023) makes a valid point: that by defining the Jewish presence in Israel as ''settler colonial'' it legitimises the destruction of the state of Israel as an objective, and has led some on the left to justify the Hamas terror attack of 7 October. Under the banner of decolonisation, he writes:

Western academics, students, artists, and activists have denied, excused, or even celebrated the murders by a terrorist sect that proclaims an anti-Jewish genocidal program.

This is true. And even though such people remain a minority within the Palestine solidarity movement, some among its majority have tolerated their presence.

But I doubt Sebag Montefiore's article will convince many of the young people proclaiming their “exhilaration” at the Hamas attack. Nor should it invalidate an academic discipline devoted to the study of a historic phenomenon labelled ''settler colonialism'', which that has advanced our understanding of white supremacy.

Sebag Montefiore describes decolonisation theory as:

a toxic, historically nonsensical mix of Marxist theory, Soviet propaganda, and traditional anti-Semitism from the Middle Ages and the 19th century

and notes that it has

replaced traditional universalist leftist values, including internationalist standards of decency and respect for human life and the safety of innocent civilians

But he cannot explain why it has done so, or how the ''nonsensical mix'' has solidified into a coherent ideology among young people, other than that its rise is part of a wider disintegration of rigour in academia.

Those of us on the left who do want to defend universalism, the rule of law and the Enlightenment tradition need to give a fuller account of the advantages and limits of decolonisation/settler colonialism theory; of the material roots of its popularity; and propose an alternative that goes beyond the reactionary defence of imperialist colonisation, which many liberals and conservatives have adopted.

The roots of left Hamas apologism

That these tasks are urgent can be seen from numerous apologies for Hamas terror coming from the left.

For clarity, I am not primarily speaking of the Leninist left, whose support for Hamas' violence is predictable, though cautiously worded, and flows from the early Comintern's methodology (which says that wars by colonised peoples against imperialist armies are always just). If we were only dealing with Socialist Worker (''Smash the Racist Israeli State'') or the Revolutionary Communist Group, this would not be such a worrying phenomenon.

Instead, what we're dealing with is the coalescence of academic decolonisation theories and identity politics into an ideology that has attracted a wider group of young, otherwise left-liberal minded, progressives.

For brevity I will cite just two examples. The first is a resolution passed by the UCU branch at London University's SOAS on 18 October. It begins by noting:

The ongoing settler colonial occupation of Palestine and escalation of genocidal violence by the apartheid Israeli state, now culminating in the indiscriminate attack and siege on Gaza...

Let's break down the logic in the language. By designating the Jewish presence as a ''settler colonial occupation'' tout court - ie not just the illegal settlement/occupation of the West Bank - it confers permanent illegitimacy on the state of Israel, and thus rules out a Two State Solution.

The word ''escalation'' designates Israel's existence as inevitably genocidal. By mobilising the term ''apartheid'' the resolution implicitly links the Palestinian struggle to all other struggles against racism (except, of course, the struggle of Jews against anti-Semitism).

If, in addition to these hyperbolic claims, the UCU branch had added ''and we condemn the Hamas attack'', they might at least have signalled some elementary solidarity with its thousands of victims. Instead, they militantly defended their right not to do so, decrying:

...the targeted and racialised demand and burden placed on Palestinians and their supporters, particularly people of colour, to perform a condemnation of violence as a yardstick of their humanity and, at times, in order to preclude their designation as terrorists.

In short, according to the SOAS-UCU resolution, it is racist to ask those chanting for a “global intifada” to condemn the 7 October attack: not only racist to the Palestinians but to their non-white supporters on campus.

To see where this approach leads in practice, let's look at a second example: the words of Barnaby Raine, a PhD student at Columbia University who shot to notoriety after he celebrated the Hamas attack, while it was in progress, by tweeting:

Shabbat Shalom and may every coloniser fall everywhere

Raine, who is Jewish, went on to attack Rishi Sunak for characterising the 7 October as a ''pogrom'', asking his critics (including myself):

Do you see how reading the violence of the dispossessed as racist savagery works to dehumanise them and to legitimate a genocide against them? Europe constantly projects its obsessions onto Palestinians, who don't much care about the religion of their coloniser.

Raine's logic is the same as that of the infamous Harvard Student statement (see Conflict & Democracy 11 October 2023): because the violence of oppressed people may be justified, classifying a specific act of violence as in any way racist, or condemning its criminality, or condemning those who celebrate it, is itself racist.

This is what we are now up against: the abject degeneration of parts of the left intelligentsia into political amoralism, fuelled by a racialised reading of the structures of global capitalism which demotes all other dynamics.

At its worst it leads to unconditional/uncritical support for violence perpetrated by one of the most reactionary forces in the world. So how did it become the new orthodoxy for parts of the Western left?

The answer lies only partly in decolonisation theory; the wider problem - as I've explored here many times - is the emergence of neo-Stalinism in the West, which is strategically wedded to the overthrow of the rules-based global order, allied to Russia and China in geopolitics, amplified by their hybrid aggression techniques, and based on profoundly anti-humanist moral premises.

To defeat this ideology we have to do something Sebag Montefiore does not: accept what is real in the decolonisation thesis.

What is real in decolonisation theory?

First, that capitalism was born as a system predating on the peoples, natural resources and biosphere of the non-capitalist world - and was justified by expressly racist ideologies from the get-go.

During the so-called ''primitive accumulation'' phase - the 16th to late 18th centuries - capital accumulation took the form of African slave plantations, the massacre and displacement of indigenous peoples, the systematic use of indentured labour among colonised populations, the systematic plunder of natural resources, outright piracy and the unequal exchange of goods at gunpoint.

Then, in the 19th and 20th centuries, capitalism created a system of formal empires based on explicit Social Darwinist ideologies of white supremacy.

However, during this high period of imperialism (roughly the 1870s to the 1940s), the model of domination bifurcated: across much of Africa and Asia, the ''classic'' colonial relationship rested on the exploitation of indigenous peoples by a white colonial elite, and the export of resources back to the imperial heartland.

However, in the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, non-European Russia and (it is argued) much of Latin America, imperialism took the form of ''settler colonialism'': implanting European-born workers and farmers, substantially replicating the economic model of the metropolitan countries, and either marginalising the indigenous population from the rule of law or eradicating them altogether.

During the post-1945 period, formal independence and self-determination did not lead to the end of economic subjugation for the former colonies. Nor did it end overt structural racism in the metropolitan countries. And today, as financial globalisation has gone into crisis, we are seeing parts of the Western political elite embrace overt, white ethno-nationalism, legitimising the overtly racist ideologies that were kept alive by the post-war far right (see recent Tory use of the Great Replacement Theory, for example).

Second, as a result, even today, accounts of reality that emphasise capitalism's inherent racial injustice run up against both conscious and unconscious bias in favour of an imperialism-forgiving, Eurocentric narrative.

Third, both in former colonies and the metropolitan heartlands, people of colour, the descendants of slaves and indigenous people share a common experience: their mental and physical health is continuously damaged and downgraded by the structural racism they experience, by the white supremacist narratives that surround them, and by inter-generational trauma.

Why has this methodology, which emerged in the 1990s and only really took off in the past 15 years, supplanted Marxism, structuralism and liberalism in academia, and now morphed into an ideology of resistance among some young people?

My hunch is: because it describes the lived experience of an increasingly multi-ethnic, young, global north population better than any of its rivals. And because - in a globally networked information sphere - it creates a shared language between people fighting poverty and oppression in the global south, and the ethnic minorities of the global north, in a way that neither Marxism, liberalism or secular nationalism was able to. Plus, as this week’s TikTok craze for quoting Osama Bin Laden shows, it is being massively boosted by Chinese and Russian hybrid warfare techniques.

If, from the late 18th century onwards, it was legitimate to critique capitalism based on its economic injustice (socialism) and gender injustice (feminism), it is also legitimate to critique capitalism on the basis of its racial injustice, and to explore/challenge the official story being told by e.g. statues of slave traders, war memorials for colonialist armies and the classic ''British Empire'' narrative taught in schools. The problem is, until the post-war generation of anti-colonial Marxist writers emerged (Fanon, Césaire, Rodney, Cabral etc), nobody had systematically done this - and even when they did, both orthodox Marxism and social democracy remained hostile to their insights.

As a journalist and historian who works in the tradition of historical materialism, for example, I have to recognise that neither Marxism, Leninism, nor 20th century Western Marxism ever properly theorised the centrality of white supremacy to the history of capitalism.

That it took Frantz Fanon, a highly unorthodox Western Marxist, to “stretch Marxism” so that it could explain the long-term psychological impact of colonial power-structures on the people resisting them, is testimony to that. In addition, when it comes to the study of the USSR and PRC, most academic traditions have shared a methodological blindness to the imperialist, racist and settler colonial aspects of these regimes.

Decolonisation, if used as an analytical lens - alongside other lenses like class, gender, world systems theory and political economy - can help us throw light on both the past and the present. Witness, for example, the recent ''decolonisation'' of the Western academic approach to Ukraine, where a new generation of scholars has broken free of frameworks centred around the Russian Empire, the USSR and a Russian-dominated post-Soviet space.

The category of ''settler colonialism'', as Lorenzo Veracini points out, was only properly developed in the 1970s. Leninism had categorised countries like Australia and Canada as part of the imperialist metropole, barely registering the fate of their indigenous people. In the 1970s, the New Left began to notice that some ''settler colonists'' had actually fought against the interests of finance capital, and began to theorise such countries as a ''third type'', beyond the metropole/periphery binary. Finally, in the 1990s, the study of settler colonialism as an ideology, economic structure and pattern of violence matured, within the rising meta-discipline of “postcolonial studies”.

What's wrong with decolonisation theory?

What is problematic about decolonisation as a theory of resistance can be understood by comparing it to socialism and feminism. Both are universalist ideologies rooted in the Enlightenment: they state that the exploitation of workers, and the oppression of women is dysfunctional to human development and can be overcome through struggle.

Both presuppose that there is one human species, one social history of that species, and that different parts of social reality - the Manila slum, downtown Manhattan, the blasted ruins of Kharkiv - belong to a whole system.

But what is decolonisation? Either it is a contribution to the search for totality - our wider attempt to discover one, complex truth about the history and reality of capitalism; or it is a mirror image of white ethnocentrism, in which indigenous people, the descendants of black slaves, and non-white immigrants are said to possess a ''truth'' separate from everyone else’s, so that ''race'' and ''settler colonialism'' become the only valid frameworks for understanding capitalism.

As a historical materialist, when I use the category ''worker'' or ''woman'' I am describing a subset of the human species, whose members share (because, yes, Marxism is a form of essentialism) - a human essence. It's the same when I discuss ethnicities.

I know that ''race'' is an ideological construct. I know that genetics, however, recognises geographically-defined sub-clades of the human genome: so when I look at my own DNA profile, which tells me I am 27.5% ''Ashkenazy Jewish'', I do so confident of the fact that I am a member of the species homo sapiens and that my universal rights under international law derive from this biological attribute.

The trouble you can get into once you abandon humanist universalism can be illustrated from the celebrated academic paper ''Decolonization Is Not A Metaphor'' (Tuck and Yang, 2012) - whose title was repeatedly appropriated by some on the left to vaunt their exhilaration at the Hamas atrocity.

Tuck and Yang attack the use of ''decolonisation'' to describe the reform of curricula and institutional practices in American academia. For them it should mean so much more. Their paper is, inevitably, written in the impenetrable language that Sebag Montefiore identifies as a barrier to logical interrogation. But it yields some insights into why decolonisation has become an ideology, and what is wrong with it.

Tuck and Yang, speak of two kinds of colonialism: external and internal. The external form:

denotes the expropriation of fragments of Indigenous worlds, animals, plants and human beings, extracting them in order to transport them to - and build the wealth, the privilege, or feed the appetites of - the colonizers, who get marked as the first world

The internal form consists of:

the biopolitical and geopolitical management of people, land, flora and fauna within the “domestic” borders of the imperial nation. This involves the use of particularized modes of control - prisons, ghettos, minoritizing, schooling, policing - to ensure the ascendancy of a nation and its white elite.

Three things strike me about these definitions.

First, they do not describe social relations at all. Instead, they describe relationships between a set of elite human beings (the white elite/colonisers) and a set of objects including, trees, animals and people reduced to sub-human status, none of which have agency.

Secondly, they do not actually concern relationships between countries: there is no theory of international relations or economic domination in there at all, whether we are talking about Australia's role in the British Empire, or of Nigeria's role in neoliberal globalisation.

Third, they are primarily interested in relationships within the global north: between people whose ancestors were ''transported'' here to serve the colonisers (ie migrant communities) and the surviving indigenous populations, who are assumed to be natural allies of each other.

Whatever insights this framework might provide, the one thing it cannot encompass is totality: it cannot describe or explain the economic, social and military relationships that drove the rise of capitalism and whose after-effects blight the lives of people all over the world. Indeed, in a footnote the authors insist:

Capitalism and the state are technologies of colonialism, developed over time to further colonial projects.

Colonialism, therefore, is the primary process, causing and shaping all else, but its economic content is entirely secondary to the self-gratification of white elites.

From these premises - which in typical postmodernist fashioned are decreed ex-Cathedra without any supporting data or logic - flow several conclusions:

Settlers are diverse, not just of white European descent, and include people of color, even from other colonial contexts... Therefore, settler nations are not immigrant nations.

As a result, ethnic identities in global north societies can be legitimately sorted into hierarchies. Applied to the USA, this statement could mean that a Korean grocery store owner, or an Indian-born software engineer should be classed as ''settler colonists'' in their own country.

Furthermore, attempts to build solidarity between the victims of imperialism may be invalid:

In particular, describing all struggles against imperialism as ‘decolonizing’ creates a convenient ambiguity between decolonization and social justice work, especially among people of color, queer people, and other groups minoritized by the settler nation-state.

This, in turn, invalidates class as a framework for studying oppression:

This is why ‘labor’ or ‘workers’ as an agential political class fails to activate the decolonizing project. “[S]hifting lines of the international division of labor” (Spivak, 1985, p. 84) bisect the very category of labor into caste-like bodies built for work on one hand and rewardable citizen-workers on the other. Some labor becomes settler, while excess labor becomes enslavable, criminal, murderable.

This is a version of the Leninist labour aristocracy thesis taken to extremes. While orthodox Leninists claim skilled white workers form a bourgeois layer within the working class, whose reformist politics have to be defeated by unskilled and poor workers with fewer stakes in the system, decolonisation suggests the primary division is even more irremediable. Those who work for ''reward'' (ie ordinary wages) are ''settler labour'', no matter that they may experience racism and exploitation; only those criminalised, enslaved and ''murderable'' can be truly classified as oppressed subjects.

Not all proponents of decolonisation theory take such an extreme methodological position. But if we were to sum up Tuck and Yang's thesis in formal logic it might look like this:

Colonialism is the cause of capitalism and the modern state. Its purpose is to create white supremacy, which has reproduced itself in successive forms (mercantile, industrial and now neoliberal financial capitalism). The primary relationship of oppression in the world is between white settler colonists and a variety of ''things'', including land, animals and people. This, not class exploitation or women’s oppression, is the primary dynamic in America, Europe and the UK.

As to the programme of decolonisation, the authors are clear as to what it is not:

It is not converting Indigenous politics to a Western doctrine of liberation; it is not a philanthropic process of ‘helping’ the at-risk and alleviating suffering; it is not a generic term for struggle against oppressive conditions and outcomes. ... By contrast, decolonization specifically requires the repatriation of Indigenous land and life. Decolonization is not a metonym for social justice.

Again, translated into formal logic: Because capitalism, industrialisation and the modern state are products of racist settler colonialism, any struggle that fails to reverse the colonisation process is invalid.

Decolonisation theory, then, is a list of prohibitions: white workers cannot be exploited; white women cannot be oppressed; all attempts to fight for social justice are ''moves to innocence'' by the perpetrators. It is a parody of Leninism, only without the hope.

If applied to any Western society today it is a recipe for defeat and despair...

Does the settler colonial frame apply to Israel-Palestine?

Let us clear up a language issue. There are Israeli settlers in the West Bank, living on stolen land, with a project of illegal colonisation and the prevention of any Palestinian statehood. Their settlement project has been repeatedly described as apartheid by the UN’s special rapporteur.

But that is not primarily what the decolonial activists are talking about. When the SOAS-UCU resolution speaks of the ''ongoing settler colonial occupation of Palestine'' it has to be talking about the Jewish presence in Palestine, not simply West Bank settlers.

With the emergence of Likud/far-right hegemony in Israeli politics, and since the collapse of the Oslo process, framing Israel as an essentially ''settler colonial project'', linked to a generic global phenomenon of white supremacy, has become central for those on the left opposed to the Two State Solution.

The Israeli anthropologist Jeff Halper, in Decolonising Israel: Liberating Palestine, outlines the argument as follows. The essential process driving conflict between Israel and the Palestinians is:

the colonization of Palestine by the Zionist movement, culminating in a state of Israel ruling over the entirety of the country.

Zionism, he says, adopted the settler colonial process because it could not live with an indigenous Arab population and had to drive Arabs away, following the historic patterns laid down by white settlers in the USA, Canada, Australia, North Africa and even Nordic peoples in Scandinavia (against the Sami people). As a result, he insists, nothing short of the abolition of the State of Israel, and the abandonment of Zionism by Israeli Jews, can solve the problem:

If the problem is a dispute between two countries or a civil war between two nationalisms, as the Palestinian/Israeli “conflict” is often phrased, then a conflict-resolution model might resolve it. But it cannot resolve a colonial situation. That requires an entirely different process of resolution: decolonization, the dismantling of the colonial entity so that a new, inclusive body politic may emerge.

Halper cites Lorenzo Veracini's five stage model for settler-colonialism, in which the arrivals first create an ideology (Zionism), then invade (the Yishuv during the British Mandate period), then commit ''foundational violence'' (Nakba, occupation of Palestinian territories). Stage four is the creation of a ''Dominance Management Regime''. Stage five is the final triumph of the settler regime where the indigenous people are driven out, killed, marginalised or pacified.

To prevent this final stage - which so many Palestinians fear is the true strategy of the Likud/far-right coalition and the de facto goal of the current Gaza operation - Halper, writing in 2021, argued that only a comprehensive plan of decolonisation, which dismantles the Dominance Management Regime can end the conflict.

Halper criticises the Fatah/PLO tradition for abandoning anti-colonial project, in favour of co-existence with Zionism, and notes that since the 1980s:

no detailed program of decolonisation has ever been presented, not by the Palestinian leadership, or by its academics or civil society activists.

He wants the Palestinians and the Israeli left to unite around One State Solution, and to use their leverage within international civil society, and ultimately with influential governments, to pursue the One State Solution via a mixture of carrot and stick: BDS etc as the stick, security guarantees for Israeli Jews as the carrot.

Dipping into Halper's 2021 book after 7 October, I am struck by the fact that there are only four references to the word Hamas, each of them glancing, and precisely zero expectation that Hamas might totally alter the dynamics of the situation by launching a genocidal attack aimed at triggering a regional war for the destruction of Israel.

Halper was not alone in discounting the possibility. Jake Sullivan's infamous Foreign Affairs article did the same. Nor did it cross my own mind, even when covering the 2014 war from inside Gaza, that these suit-wearing social conservatives had any intention of fighting Israel for anything other than concessions. Since 2014, most Israeli debates about the One State Solution have revolved around the expected subsidence of the Palestinian armed struggle.

In the immediate aftermath of 7 October there is only one form of decolonisation on offer: a Hamas victory which enacts the genocidal intentions of the 1988 Covenant. Likewise, for the Israeli far right, whose genocidal comments in response to the massacre have been well documented, ''Nakba 2023'' is on the agenda. Try as I might, I cannot see any practical application for the peaceful decolonisation plan Halper outlined.

Faced with this, Dmitry Shumsky, professor in the history of Zionism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, insists that the 7 October massacre has killed the One State Solution. Not only must it drive the international community to embrace Two States as an urgent strategy for regional de-escalation, Shumsky writes:

... it can certainly be said today that the one-state paradigm has been tested in reality, and the horrific results of this test speak for themselves. The cruel campaign of murder of Israeli civilians by the Palestinian nationalist-Islamic Hamas movement on that Black Saturday, along with Israel’s brutal campaign of retaliation, have served as a kind of precursor to the Israeli-Palestinian “coexistence” that awaits both peoples in a binational state – a taste of binational disaster.

If you want to be charitable to those left activists in the UK prepared to march, without demur, alongside people chanting ''Khaybar, Khaybar O Yahud'', and waving the Shahada flag (I don't), you could interpret everything they're doing as an attempt to apply Halper's utopian, peaceful strategy in the wrong circumstance.

Less charitably: if you promote a theory that tells you white people cannot be victims, that allows you to classify all Israeli Jews as white, that identifies Jews in Britain as part of a white settler colonialist elite, that rules out class solidarity, that suspends basic feminist solidarity with the victims of sexual violence, and is grounded in the impossibility of hope and change, then at some point you are going to find people tearing down posters of kidnapped Israeli kids or standing outside Keir Starmer's office ranting about how his wife is ''a Zionist''.

The decolonisation theory has, in short, become an obstacle to the development of a reality-based response to 7 October for parts of the left.

Allied to classical Leninism (which always supports the armed resistance of colonised peoples) and to outright Islamism - which is tangibly present on the Palestine Solidarity demos, and wants a Caliphate not decolonisation - the theory draws its mobilising power from the very incoherence Sebag Montefiore complains about.

But as Chibber points out, it is unlikely to disappear:

Over the past quarter century, enormous resources have been sunk into the material infrastructure that sustains the theory. There are journals wholly committed to it, chairs in humanities departments dedicated to its propagation, sections in disciplinary societies that convene annually with hundreds of attendees, book series at publishing houses with enormous lists and promises of forthcoming volumes. None of this will come to an end anytime soon simply because the theory happens to be deeply flawed.

Rescuing the metaphor

I believe that the vast majority of people mobilised on demonstrations against the Israeli bombing of Gaza, and for an immediate ceasefire, are there for principled reasons. Like it or not, the decolonisation theory has taken root among them and has to be debunked, insofar as it becomes a guide to action.

Rescuing it as a lens through which to study reality means acknowledging those insights that are valuable:

• Establishing the centrality of racism to capitalism is an important theoretical achievement.
• Giving voice and agenda-setting roles to indigenous peoples, who were marginalised both by under capitalist and communist imperialism is vital.
• Critiquing academic disciplines - from anthropology to literature to economics - from the point of view of marginalised indigenous peoples is essential.
• If we understand the structural nature of racism in Western societies, and its historical rootedness in slavery and colonialism, we should expect its victims to form alliances that defy white/elite/liberal mainstream views on how the oppressed should resist.
• If we understand that racism is not only structural, but reproduced in micro-scale human interactions and relationships, we should expect its victims to bring the legacy of centuries of imperialist violence into the conversation.

The political task is to separate these entirely legitimate attempts to decolonise language and practice, each of which is essentially metaphoric (sorry Tuck and Yang), from movements that seek to excuse terrorism, deny the reality of the Hamas atrocity and destroy the state of Israel. Israel exists. So must Palestine.

I could take issue with parts of Sebag Montefiore's account of Israel's founding trauma, but he is right to point out the tenuousness of the claim that the Yeshuv was part of a generic project of white imperial settlement.

I think he underplays the danger of the genocidal thought being expressed by the Israeli far-right. Though this war hopefully ends with a ceasefire, the fall of Netanyahu, and leads to serious progress on Two States, we cannot be certain that it will. There are other, horrific outcomes that have to be named to be avoided.

What matters to me are not the details of the foundation story, nor any generic model of white settlement. It is the fact that Israel exists, and is recognised as a state under international law.

Its settlements and annexations in the West Bank are illegal under the self-same international legal system, while Palestine's claim to recognition as a sovereign, independent state is supported by that system.

That's why I defend Israel's right to exist and seek a Two State Solution in line with numerous UN resolutions, with unified state of Palestine, in the West Bank and Gaza, as close to the 1967 borders as the two parties can agree on.

At the same time we have to acknowledge the extreme peril that the global Jewish population now find themselves in.

I am only a quarter Jewish: I was raised as a Catholic and have only been in Israel for a grand total of 48 hours, in order to get in and out of Gaza in 2014. But within minutes of seeing the images flooding across social media on 7 October I understood: this is a project to eradicate my existence; the global call for a second Holocaust.

A quote from Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate began running around my brain. It’s from the letter that the physicist Viktor Shtrum receives from his secular, communist mother, in Berdichiv, after the Nazis have created the ghetto:

That morning I was reminded of what I’d forgotten during the years of the Soviet regime – that I was a Jew. Some Germans drove past on a lorry, shouting out: ‘Juden kaputt!’

I understand why Jews, in Britain and elsewhere, are terrified by the wave of anti-Semitism, including left-wing anti-Semitism, that is sweeping civil society. When I observe the leniency that some on the student left are granting to outright anti-Semitism, I see the same complacency that I've studied as a historian, among the workers’ movements of Europe in the 1930s: the same absence of a theory of evil.

My grandfather’s generation could imagine bad stuff: they’d lived through a war that killed millions. But nothing in their moral vocabulary allowed them to anticipate what Nazism would do. And that’s the point of having a moral vocabulary - something that both Leninism and postmodernism teach is pointless. The moral and ethical vocabulary allows you to recognise radical evil before it happens.

At the same time, I’ve spent years studying the ideology of the new far right. Their project, as I outlined in How To Stop Fascism, is a global ethnic civil war that ends modernity. They want Muslims expelled from Western society, just as the Nazis did to the Jews. Paradoxically what the fascists want, and what Hamas want, are the same things: that’s why much of the far right in the USA has piled in alongside the red-brown grifters to excuse Hamas and promote its narratives.

The danger is real. The multilateral world order that underpins Israel's existence is disintegrating. Might is replacing right.

Russia and China have adopted the explicit project of replacing a rules-based order and a universal concept of human rights with naked Great Power politics and cultural relativism. American power is crumbling. Instead of facing the challenge of multipolarity with confidence, red lines and a strategy, the American political class, and much of the electorate, has turned isolationist.

As a result, the unspoken fear that looms over the Middle East is not simply a regional war that goes nuclear. It is that American power in the region shatters, as it did in Afghanistan in 2021 - because the task of defending Ukraine, Taiwan and Israel at once proves too much, forcing Biden into impossible choices, which overwhelm a democracy that is already under threat from Trump and his insurrectionary allies.

Faced with this threat, the urgent fight for a Two State Solution is a second front in the defence of the multi-lateral, rules-based global system.

And to the extent that decolonisation theory has become the intellectual framework for justifying Israel's destruction, and the impossibility of Two States, it has to be resisted intellectually and morally.

The hybrid warfare context

To do it smartly, we need to understand how easily decolonisation has been co-opted into the influence projects of the West's systemic rivals, Russia and China.

Xi Jin Ping and his proxies in the West speak the language of orthodox Marxism-Leninism. Intellectually, they don't give a shit about the decolonisation thesis. ...