De demonisering van Israël in links-academische kring is dagelijks in het nieuws. Waar komt dat vandaan? Welke ideeën zitten daar achter?
Frederik van Gelder licht toe waarom hij een artikel hierover van de Duitse filosoof Ingo Elbe in het Engels vertaalde.
Ik bied de lezers van De Vrijdagavond deze vertaling aan van de filosoof Ingo Elbe, van de Carl von Ossietzky Universiteit Oldenburg, dat onlangs verscheen in de Jüdische Allgemeine. Het is een samenvatting van Elbe’s monografie: Antisemitismus und postkoloniale Theorie: Der ‘progressive’ Angriff auf Israel, Judentum und Holocausterinnerung.
Ik doe dit omdat ik geloof dat Elbe erin is geslaagd een tipje van de sluier op te lichten over iets wat voor veel mensen een enorm raadsel is: Hoe het komt dat zich in het hart van de elite-universiteiten van het Westen, te beginnen bij de Ivy League-universiteiten in de VS, zich een ‘grand narrative’ heeft gevestigd dat – op het eerste gezicht – volledig modern is met diepe morele impulsen en overtuigend voor jonge mensen.
Dit ‘grote verhaal’ lijkt volledig aan te sluiten bij de emancipatoire bewegingen die zo velen van ons beschouwen als de progressiefste vormen van politiek zoals de vrouwenbeweging, de burgerrechtenbeweging, rechten voor homoseksuelen en mensen die lijden aan zogeheten ‘genderdysforie’, rechten voor minderheden, erkenning voor de langetermijngevolgen van slavernij en koloniale uitbuiting.
Hoe kwam het dat bewegingen die zo velen van ons – vooral degenen met een Joodse achtergrond – zo lang hebben gesteund, veranderd in wat Elbe “de academisch-activistische demonisering van Israël” noemt? Dat is waar dit artikel – en het boek waarop het is gebaseerd – over gaat. Het is duidelijk dat in een tijd waarin de gebeurtenissen in het Midden-Oosten zoveel andere zaken overschaduwen, niet alleen een joods lezerspubliek alle reden heeft om dit artikel aandachtig te lezen en te bestuderen.
De redactie van De Vrijdagavond vindt dit onderwerp zo relevant dat wij de vertaling van Frederik van Gelder integraal overnemen.
Ingo Elbe: Postcolonial Theory and its consequences
Since the pogrom of October 7, a wave of hatred against Israel has flooded Western universities. What we are currently seeing is a significant radicalisation of left-wing actors, even if the trend of which this is the result itself goes back a long way.
What is playing such a significant role in all of this is a type of thinking that has become increasingly popular in many areas of academia, namely postcolonial theory. It is a theory that claims to be able to detect traces of colonialism within forms of knowledge and social structures long after colonial rule itself has formally ended.
The motif of “coloniality” — a collective term for the diagnosis of a Western world order that is supposed to have covered the so-called global South with racist exclusion and genocide for some 500 plus years—is declared to be the main yardstick for historical analysis and social criticism.
Adepts of this new grand narrative are convinced that with the notion of “coloniality” they have also hit upon a key for the understanding of Judaism, Zionism, Antisemitism, and the Shoah. Which leads to deep-seated theoretical distortions that are systematic: Antisemitism is dissolved conceptually into racism, the Holocaust is relativised as a colonial crime, Israel is demonised, and Islamic and Arab antisemitism is ignored.
The Israeli historian Anita Shapira puts it aptly: “The Jew as victim becomes an ideal.”
The demonisation of Israel is a long-standing practice in this movement, and it can take various forms. A direct transference of antisemitic motifs onto Israel is common. For example, an icon of the postmodern left, Judith Butler, speaks of Israel “murdering children”. In her accusation that Jews who defend a nation state are betraying their essence, there is an echo of the legend of the Jew condemned to eternal exile, to a diaspora existence of surrender to the Other. In an apt formulation by the Israeli historian Anita Shapira, “The Jew as victim becomes an ideal.”
This is where the notorious formula ‘National Socialism equals Israel’ kicks in. Here’s the source of the idea of Israel supposedly continuing the process of nationalism leading to the Holocaust, which is why prominent postcolonials resort to such grotesque analogies: the situation in the Gaza Strip or the West Bank is supposed to remind of Nazi concentration camps or the Warsaw Ghetto.
For Ramón Grosfoguel, “Hitlerism as a continuation of colonial racist ideology came back to hunt Palestinians, this time at the hands of European Jews”. In the fight against Israel, “the future of humanity is at stake”, no less. According to this redemptive anti-Zionism, “The Palestinian victory will take humanity to a higher level of consciousness.”
Israel is seen as the incarnation of all Western colonial crimes, “eliminating” the “indigenous people”, the Palestinians.
Israel is seen as the incarnation of all Western colonial crimes, “eliminating” the “indigenous people”, in this case the Palestinians. The US activist Linda Sarsour goes so far as to defend the dehumanisation of the supposedly white Jewish settlers. Pointing to the Zionists, she warns: “If you’re on the side of the oppressor, or you’re defending the oppressor, or you’re actually trying to humanize the oppressor, then that’s a problem”.
So it’s no wonder that London professor Gilbert Achcar, who as recently as June 2022 was still a guest at the “Hijacking Memory” conference organised by the Centre for Research on Antisemitism (ZfA) and the Einstein Forum, celebrates the Hamas massacre of October 7 as a “quasi-desperate act of bravery”.
The more elegant strategy, however, is the humanistically draped demonisation of Israel through the de-realization of the antisemitic brutality itself, as can be found in the popular “contextualisations” of the October pogrom. An open letter signed by leading representatives of Postcolonial Studies such as A. Dirk Moses and Michael Rothberg, but also by the director of the ZfA, Stefanie Schüler-Springorum, states: “Seventy-five years of displacement, fifty-six years of occupation, and sixteen years of the Gaza blockade have generated an ever-deteriorating spiral of violence that can only be arrested by a political solution.”
Here, Arab pogroms against the Yishuv in the 1920s and 30s, the Palestinian refusal to accept a Jewish state, the wars of aggression by Arab armies against Israel and its peace offers in 2000 or 2008 are completely ignored—in such Manichean formulations by leading academics, there is apparently room only for one victim and one perpetrator.
At the root of this type of demonisation, within postcolonial studies, there is however a very basic methodological and political deficit.
If one takes, as a point of departure, Edward Said’s idea of Orientalism—a key example for this way of thinking—then the West invents the image of a degraded Oriental Other in order to define itself, to purge its self-image from all that is negative, to create a self-justication for its imperial claim to power.
Much of the writing from the postcolonial movement cultivates a double standard: one needs only to take a closer look at the representation of how the “West” is said to discuss the “global South”. This is always represented as the exercise of illegitimate colonial power, with the substance of such discourse being entirely dismissed.
The “global South” is often presented as victim, or is treated as a mute object for projection.
The “global South” comes to be seen as a victim or as a mute projection surface, and thereby presented as conceptually incapable. The Islamic Studies scholar Bernard Lewis has spoken ironically of the “white man’s burden of guilt”, a negative superiority mindset that assumes that only white Europeans can be responsible for the world’s ills.
The “Other”, Islamist regimes and movements such as Iran or Hamas for instance, seldom feature as protagonists at all. Should their acts of violence and power relations be discussed, they are not taken seriously, antisemitic statements are trivialised as the mere rhetoric of desperate victims, and their behaviour is interpreted as merely reactive to the actions of the West or those of Israel.
At the same time, what are presented as more complex variants of postcolonial thinking suffer from systematic flaws all of their own. Coloniality and liberal democracy are presented as two sides of the same coin. With the result that what is to follow on from ‘colonial modernity’ remains obscure. A ‘multipolar world order’ is often praised as an alternative, following a notion of left-wing ethnopluralism, which lends legitimacy to authoritarian powers such as Russia, Iran or China. Such ‘alternative modernities’ are presented under the heading of ‘hybridity’.
Where this leads, is that the colonised (whether real or imaginary) are encouraged to engage in a subversive reinterpretation of concepts such as human rights or democracy from within their own specific ethnocultural perspective: culturally specific human rights or ‘Islamic democracy’ thus become desirable goals in the struggle against Western hegemony. It is this that leads to ideological alliances between postcolonial leftists and jihadists—one needs merely to read the unambiguous statements of left-wing protagonists like Judith Butler, Susan Buck-Morss, Walter Mignolo or Ramón Grosfoguel.
Preventing insight through the simulation of overcomplexity.
Large swathes of the academic left, however, are engaged in a defence against critique: one labours to block understanding through the simulation of over-complexity—one proclaims that postcolonial theory, as a unitary idea, does not exist. Or one claims that there is an enormous gulf between highly differentiated postcolonial studies and their simplistic reception in activist circles. But for all that, for all the internal differences of postcolonial approaches, the above-mentioned argumentation patterns appear so regularly and so often, especially amongst its high-profile representatives, that it is necessary to speak of a dominant mindset.
Finally
And finally, these academics themselves often act as activists, presenting themselves as such. Manifesting itself not only in the manichean* and simplistic arguments—sometimes reaching excruciating levels—to be found in the now almost endless number of open letters against Israel.
Jews have nothing good to expect from such academic activism in the 21st century.
*Manichean or thinking in “dualities,” solely in black and white.
Ingo Elbe is Privatdozent and research associate at the Institute of Philosophy at the Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg. He was a speaker at the conference of the Education Department of the Zentralrat der Juden ‘Macht der Projektion—antiisraelische Projektion als Weltwahrnehmung’ in Berlin, 14 to 16 April.
First published in the Jüdische Allgemeine, vertaling Frederik van Gelder
cover en overige beelden: uit de collectie ‘Beeldoorlog’ van Bloom
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