Is now really the right time to talk about the left’s political violence problem? Graduate students are being disappeared off the streets of college towns. American-made bombs have killed numbers of Gazan children greater than the circulations of n+1 and Jewish Currents combined. The far right is triumphant across the world and already turning the levers of state power against the under-documented and the overeducated.
Against this background, it seems risible to turn back to what Adam Shatz has called “the ethno-tribalist fantasies of the decolonial left, with their Fanon recitations and posters of paragliders.” Febrile delusions of nativists and reactionaries aside, the left’s fascination with violence, its Mangione memes and Sinwar graffiti, appears to have few real-life consequences outside the hurt feelings of some undergraduates and the ruffled feathers of those business and cultural figures who seem glad of the excuse to be able to finally defect to the rampant right.
And yet I am going to try to convince you that the left’s violence problem is serious and real. The left’s endorsement of political violence is most dangerous not for what it says—the actual arguments are frequently below reproach, and their effects on the social world remain relatively minor—but for what it does to the political horizons of the left today.
The left’s flirtation with political violence, with “the resistance” in Gaza, with unrealized uprisings at home, occupy the place where an understanding of effective means and a vision of emancipatory ends should be. As the critic Adam Kirsch observes in his recent polemic On Settler Colonialism, the left frequently supports the use of violence in situations where there is no feasible way in which violence can achieve its desired ends. In some cases, it refuses to even state these ends, leaving a negative space where a political vision should be.
For Kirsch, the clearest example of this confusion about means and ends was the celebration across the left of Hamas’s attack across the Gaza border in October 2023, an attack whose aims it is not clear the Anglophone left correctly understood, but whose violent methods it frequently celebrated. It was the events of October 7th and their reception that prompted Kirsch’s fusillade against what he takes to be the essential cause of the left’s confusion—its devotion to the doctrines of settler-colonial theory. Kirsch’s book sets out to show that the titular concept
attributes many different varieties of injustice to the same abstraction and promises that slaying this dragon will end them all. It cultivates hatred for people and institutions it sees as obstacles to redemption, and even justifies violence against them. And it offers a distorted account of history, to make it easier to divide the world into the guilty and the innocent.
Kirsch’s book certainly has its flaws. Chief among them is its blindness to the political realities of Israel, a state that was only ever something close to a liberal democracy for the six months between the end of military rule over Israeli Arabs at the end of 1966 and the beginning of the military occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in June 1967. It ignores the ironic truth that Israel is in fact a perfect example of an exploitative colonial state in its extractive and repressive settlement project in the Palestinian territories in the West Bank, and that these Israeli colonists could be returned to their metropole—Israel within the Green Line—were there only the political will to do it. And it is silent about the ways in which the Gaza war has long ceased to be a war of self-defense and is now wholly a war of territorial expansion and political expediency in the best case, and of ethnic cleansing and civilian annihilation in the worst case. These are serious mistakes about the situation in Israel, compounded by some glaring omissions and uncharitable readings of the scholarly canon he excoriates. Kirsch’s diagnosis of the political and ideological tendencies of the postcolonial left in the Anglosphere does not, however, depend on them.
Defenders of settler-colonial theory nevertheless accuse Kirsch of a feat of prestidigitation: taking a staid academic subfield devoted to explaining the history and sociology of colonization and its consequences and turning it, as Samuel Brody puts it in the Boston Review, into “a repository of everything that liberals, centrists, and conservatives have hated about radical academia since McCarthyism.” But Kirsch’s most important target, as the philosopher Michael Walzer notes in his review of the book, is neither the academic field of settler-colonial studies nor the state of the conflict in Israel/Palestine. Rather, Kirsch is after the “actual politics” that animates the anti-colonial left today. According to Kirsch, their political goal, decolonization, “is a zero-sum game, in which Natives win (land, sovereignty, power) only if settlers lose.” To quote the scholars Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, cited frequently by Kirsch, the claims of the colonized and the claims of settlers are in principle “incommensurable” and therefore not open to negotiation. If politics is the art of the possible, or as many since Aristotle have supposed, a science of living together, the politics informed by this brand of postcolonial theory is instead religious and, in the words of Frantz Fanon, Manichean: the triumph of good over evil by any means necessary.
Kirsch’s critics complain that he is making a strawman out of contemporary left political approaches. He is not. Kirsch’s critique makes good sense of the fruitless desperation of left-wing violence in the United States, as well as the global left’s often thoughtless support for violence in the Middle East. More damningly, it picks out patterns of thought now common in the leading left-wing organs of culture and ideas. I have chosen three such examples almost at random. I could have easily found a dozen more. But even among this richness of embarrassments, no writer exemplifies the obscurity of the contemporary decolonial left’s ends and the absurdity of its means more than Andreas Malm.
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If Malm did not already exist, Adam Kirsch might have had to invent him. For the uninitiated, Malm, a Swedish academic with a scruffy beard and kufi prayer cap (we’ll return to the prayer cap) is not a minor figure. He publishes with Verso, lectures in Paris and New York and provided the inspiration for the film How to Blow Up a Pipeline. Malm is particularly known for his dorm-room revolutionary approach to the climate crisis. Like a Scandinavian Malcolm to Greta Thunberg’s Martin, Malm urges his audience to take up arms in the name of “Fanonian” resistance to climate change; “destroying fences” at mining sites and the like, the sort of “violence of the sweetest kind” that leaves him “high for weeks.”
It would be hard to find a more perfect proof text for Kirsch’s thesis than Malm’s recent book, The Destruction of Palestine Is the Destruction of the Earth:
Limiting, stopping, reversing the destruction of Palestine and the planet therefore require, as a logically unassailable condition, the destruction of fossil fuel infrastructure and racial colonies [in Israel]—not necessarily their physical destruction; but necessarily their decommissioning and repurposing, in the cases where that is possible, and where not, on the path to their abolition, yes, their physical destruction … the catastrophe of Palestine appears to adumbrate that of climate.
Two apparently unconnected problems—the Israeli occupation of Palestine and the climate catastrophe—are assigned the same hidden cause, and thus the same violent solution. A distorted picture of history grounds conspiratorial assertions. What Malm sometimes tries to cloak in the trappings of traditional scholarship—quotations from letters, maps and secondary research—is at its heart a metaphysical assertion of sameness. All catastrophes are interchangeable: the deforestation of the Amazon would be “a different kind of Nakba”; the Nakba of 1948 is commensurate with the coastal bombardment of Acre by the British; the political economy of coal in the 1840s is the same as oil in the 1970s is the same as Israeli natural gas platforms today. Gone are the subtle contingencies of Foucault and the careful demystifications of Hobsbawm. Instead, the explanatory principle here is one of “eternal recurrences,” repetitive cycles that can only be broken, we are told, by the physical destruction of colonial settlements.
Not all catastrophes, however, are equal: Malm insists that the anti-colonial struggle is actually prior to the environmental one and demands more radical tactics including “the targeting of human bodies,” because, although it is bad, “fossil capital is not a settler-colonial project.” Indeed, he is even willing to condone fossil fuels, albeit in the short term, so long as they are “mobilised for survival and liberation.” For Malm, the anti-colonial struggle is the definitive struggle: “I came to climate through Palestine.”
It might seem indecent to assign too much significance to the thinking and writing of a person who does not speak or read Arabic but attributes his thinking about international relations to “Sayyed” Hassan Nasrallah and “the best writings of Islamic Jihad,” or to attend too much to the intellectual worth of someone who calls Hamas’s totalitarian rule over Gaza “the most complete instantiation of … democracy anywhere between Beirut and Tunis.” But, unserious as he may seem, Malm offers us a paradigmatic example of a politics where everything is a decolonial nail and the hammer of violence is always ready to hand. Perhaps most worrying, given the quality of his thought and the implications of his politics, Malm is an influential figure in his own right.
In one recent example of this nascent Malmism, the legal scholar Amna Akbar wrote a piece for n+1 in which Malm and the jailed alleged assassin Luigi Mangione are glorified in a sort of diptych as the two visionary martyrs of modern politics. Akbar’s text is suggestive and confusing. Israel and Palestine are said to “loom over the conversation” when Malm is speaking, even when he is speaking about something else. Malm’s positions on Palestine suggest how he has “scrambled” the tired and corrupt nostrums of the mainstream media, who are “perturbed” if not outright threatened by his bold and daring statements. The New York Times is so shaken by Malm’s uncomfortable truths, Akbar insinuates, that they photoshopped his picture to make it look like he was wearing an Islamist kufi.
Here is the paradox of the postcolonial left in a knit skullcap: Akbar holds up Malm’s radicalism about Palestine as the font of his moral authority about the climate, and about politics in general. But she is quite literally unable to see the very hat he in fact wears on his head as a sign of this politics. The violence of the “Palestinian resistance” has become, for both Malm and Akbar, a cipher for radicalism itself, and the signifiers of radicalism are now free-floating, connecting fiscal policy, the environment, Islam and almost everything else. Akbar’s piece is an example of anti-colonial violence as the ultima ratio of left politics run wild, and her political vision helps to demonstrate precisely what the “actual politics” of the contemporary left looks like in practice when all problems and all the possible means to solve them are collapsed.
Malm may be Akbar’s prophet of violence, preaching the fire this time to the unheeding squares at the New Yorker and the New York Times, but it is Mangione whom she singles out as the first flowering of the homegrown resistance—the one who points the way toward our future praxis: “the conjuncture in a nutshell,” as Akbar calls him. The bulk of Akbar’s exposition of this conjuncture is a comparison between Mangione, the wealthy scion of Maryland country-club magnates, and James Johnson, a black autoworker on a Chrysler assembly line who shot his abusive foreman in 1970. This is another one of Malm’s “eternal recurrences”—the difference between a black laborer at the end of the American industrial era and a sexually frustrated, wealthy white man-child is washed away in the service of “radical critique.”
Akbar is characteristically coy about both the means and the ends suggested by her political commitments. “We are at a real impasse. In the tides of the 2008 financial crisis, we have learned that protest is not enough. Electoral organizing is riddled with contradictions. Popular sentiment is insufficient. Mutual aid does not go the distance. What will it take?” Malm and Mangione point the way toward violence, but Akbar won’t spell it out—a prime example of what Kirsch calls the postcolonial left’s avoidance of “the reality of their own desires.”
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When the unwillingness to make explicit the future consequences of one’s commitments is combined with a willingness to distort the past, all that is left is the fact of ideology itself, and of the myths that support it. In the case of the left’s ideological infatuation with violence, no myth is more powerful than the successful anti-colonial uprising of the Algerian Front de Libération Nationale (FLN), and no figure is more mythic than the FLN’s sometime spokesman, the psychiatrist and theorist Frantz Fanon. Fanon’s stature seems at times almost totemic. When trying to justify his call to kill settlers, Malm assumes that “just mentioning the name of Fanon should settle this question,” as if the mere invocation of Fanon’s dense chapter “Concerning Violence” from The Wretched of the Earth obviates any need for further argument. Brody castigates Kirsch for not having read Adam Shatz’s biography of Fanon “more carefully.” Here I agree with Brody. Shatz’s book, The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon, does indeed bear careful reading.
Shatz does the difficult work of trying to paint a complete portrait of a man who is often “chopped into little pieces,” in the words of Fanon’s secretary Marie-Jeanne Manuellan. Fanon was at once a brilliant theorist and a pioneering clinician, a self-conscious heir to the traditions of the French Revolution and one of the fiercest critics of the pieties and hypocrisies of Enlightenment liberalism. There are many lessons to be gleaned from Shatz’s biography, from the essential continuities between Fanon’s intellectual interests and his psychiatric work, to his interactions and confluences with contemporaries like Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Albert Memmi. One theme of the biography bears directly on Fanon’s posthumous role as the final arbiter of truth for the postcolonial left: his often troubled relationship to practical politics.
Fanon joined the FLN by way of his role as director of the psychiatric hospital at Blida-Joinville. As a spokesman, his first public duty was to lie about the FLN’s role in the massacre of over three hundred civilians in the village of Mechta Kasbah. Fanon would later write that “in the colonial context there is no truthful behavior.” But his revolutionary discipline had serious political costs. Of these, perhaps the most painful was Fanon’s complicit silence after the murder by factional rivals of his friend and mentor Abane Ramdane, one of the leaders of the secularist, democratic faction within the FLN’s leadership.
Fanon’s political career is a story of persistent marginalization, both as a non-Algerian but also as someone whose vision of an independent Algeria open to all its Muslim, French and Jewish citizens was out of step with a movement that was increasingly conservative and sectarian in character. Fanon’s own greatest political contribution to FLN ideology was his romanticization of the rural peasantry—“its wisdom, its refusal of the temptations of Western assimilation, its incorruptibility,” in Shatz’s words—as the heart of the progressive anti-colonial revolution. Here, as in the case of Ramdane’s murder, Fanon seems to have been something of a useful dupe for the forces of reaction. As the FLN member and historian Mohammed Harbi notes, centering the values of the rural populace ultimately helped the nationalist cadres of the FLN advance the socially conservative Islamic-nationalist project to which Fanon had been opposed. Fanon was an indisputably great thinker, but he was also something of a political naïf.
Arthur Asseraf, a historian of Algeria at Cambridge who knows all of this, nevertheless argues in Jewish Currents that we should not use historical hindsight to judge the Algerian case. “In retrospect,” the divisions between the progressive democratic and revanchist Islamist wings of the FLN “seem glaring, but in the midst of colonial repression, they mattered less than the struggle to resist annihilation.” But Asseraf, unwilling to extricate himself from the political logic of the contemporary postcolonial left, wants to go beyond a sympathetic historical understanding of the conditions under which historical figures act, and recommend a form of revolutionary naïveté for our current political predicament. Because actors in the past could not be certain about the consequences of their political commitments, we should feel comfortable with, perhaps even valorize, ignorance about the consequences of our own. Asseraf presents us with the facts of the Algerian case—the Jewish fellow travelers like William Sportisse (he could have also mentioned Fanon’s friend Alice Cherki) who were jailed or forced to flee the rising terror of the post-revolutionary authoritarian Algerian state—but he denies that we should draw any lessons from what happened in the past about what sort of postcolonial struggle might best embody the values of the left, how to support it and why. “I do not need to know what decolonization will look like in Palestine in order to fight for it. It is impossible to know such an outcome—and that uncertainty does not make it any less essential.”
It is undoubtedly true that battling the barbarities of the Israeli occupation requires tremendous will and commitment from both Palestinians and their allies. But it is also true that accomplishing this successfully, and at the lowest cost to human misery possible, requires precisely the sort of strategic and judicious weighing of means that Asseraf dismisses out of hand. And while asking a person in a bombed-out building to be judicious may be callous, asking the same of a professor in Cambridge seems obvious.
The lesson of Asseraf’s ponderous piece seems to be that it would be better not to know anything at all about the disappointments of Algeria, because such knowledge has the unfortunate consequence of constraining our willingness to act blindly, not to say violently, in the present. Asseraf denies historical knowledge to make room for revolutionary faith. He resurrects the old Algerian motto of “the suitcase or the coffin” as the fate of the settler class, though he lacks Malm’s temerity in directly endorsing violence. Instead, he reverts to principled ignorance. Against the “giant coffin that has swallowed Palestine,” we must embrace the “uncertain future,” whatever it may bring.
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We are left with a bit of a mystery. Kirsch has dissected the political paralysis in which the left finds itself, and we have traced this paralysis through the vacillations and intoxications of a few recent admirers of political violence. But we do not yet know what it is about violence that so entrances the professoriate and commentariat of the contemporary Anglophone left. Shatz’s biography of Fanon may be helpful on this point as well. As Shatz notes, Fanon’s attraction to political violence, to the “searing bullets and bloodstained knives” that he described as the “naked truth of decolonization,” was motivated in part by his own disdain for middle-class squeamishness, which was of a piece with his decisive rejection of his middle-class, French-educated origins. In Fanon’s latter-day celebrity, there is more than a soupçon of petit-bourgeois infatuation with “the mood of revolt, protest, and insubordination” produced by his writing.
Though born to a relatively well-off family on a quiet provincial island, Fanon was a decorated war hero and a colonial subject, intimately familiar with violence in its many forms, from both his patients and his own experiences. And some of his devotees have in fact taken up arms, joining revolutionary struggles on every continent except Antarctica. But his latter-day readers on the Anglophone left usually come to his ideas from a background even more sedate than Fanon’s own. They are mostly professors—of history, of human ecology, of law. They are citizens of the most developed countries and graduates of the best universities. Their familiarity with violence, with physical violence, is either incidental and anecdotal or caused by the temptation of the bored bourgeois to taste something of the dangers of the world (though of course never too much).
Only someone deeply alienated from the realities of violence could mistake Mangione’s cosplay class terrorism for James Johnson’s anguished act of desperation. Only someone for whom violence is the “sweetest” form of “high”—better than whatever club drugs they have in Malmö—could wear a Marxist Popular Front t-shirt with his Islamist headwear as he pledges his willingness to take orders from Hamas’s al-Qassam Brigades.
It is tempting to say that the left today is so cavalier about the “unknowable” consequences of violence because those consequences will never redound onto the campuses its members normally frequent. Of course, that is no longer entirely true. For the first time since at least the 1960s, segments of the radical left are indeed in physical danger—from cops called into heretofore sacred precincts; from immigration enforcement playing the role once played by the secret police and chekists. But the postcolonial left’s response to physical danger in its own backyard is not to double down on physical resistance, not to head for the suburban underground or the exurban maquis—it is, of course, to appeal to the due protections of the constitutional state. Liberalism for me but not for thee.
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I am confident in describing the psychology of the radical left and its biographical and functional immunity to the actual effects of violence because I am describing my own life and political practice. For the better part of the past decade, I have been active in nonviolent forms of civil resistance across the West Bank. The principal tool that I and my fellow activists use to aid the Palestinian citizens who bear the brunt of the settler assault is the functional inviolability of our own bodies. We are Jewish, holders of valuable foreign passports, or both. Settlers and the army know that to cause us any serious harm means to suffer the sort of media or judicial attention that their regular brutalization of Palestinians never produces. I, like Malm, remember the first frisson I felt at hopping a fence or facing a burly policeman in riot gear. I, unlike Malm, understand that I am a tourist in a violent country, that my very presence is testament to an immunity those I want to support would desperately like to have.
I and those I work with continuously face the fact that our nonviolent practice has failed to accomplish its aim. The occupation only grows worse. The ethnic cleansing of vast swaths of the Jordan Valley and Masafer Yatta (the latter lately the subject of the Oscar-winning No Other Land) only accelerates. This failure has grown even more dire in light of the even freer hand the settler class has been given since the election of the current government (and the government’s encouragement of murderous assaults and pogroms has doubled and tripled since October 2023). Considering this failure, shouldn’t I be more open to the Anglophone left’s entreaties to give war a chance?
Most successful nonviolent protest movements come with the threat, or the practice, of violence as an alternative. The most famous examples of this were in South Africa and Northern Ireland. But in these cases, the use of violence had a clear and precisely defined political end. Violence without the prospect of nonviolent politics is mere nihilism. Fanon placed his political faith in a mystical idea of the revolutionary peasant. The contemporary left is willing to place its faith in movements that it does not understand—like Hamas—and in acts of redemptive violence that have no concrete social meaning or strategic purpose.
In a recent interview with Haaretz, Rashid Khalidi, student of and successor to Edward Said as the chair of Middle Eastern Studies at Columbia, complained that the hard structural logic with which the left has become so deeply enamored “blinds some people to the need to find allies on the other side.” Kirsch and Khalidi, otherwise strange bedfellows, are united in their exasperation with the left’s exclusionary politics, which are maddening as well as self-defeating. As one leftist acquaintance confidently told me, “there is no Israeli left” as far as he is concerned, a position echoed in the Palestinian diaspora-based BDS movement’s decision to boycott both No Other Land and the Israeli-Palestinian left-wing movement Standing Together because of their Israeli participants. This rejection of any means that are not total and totalizing leaves the left ripe for the counterproductive consolations of symbolic violence. It also supports the assertion by critics of the left (like Kirsch) that the obscure ends of left politics are totalitarian rather than emancipatory.
Let me be clear about what I take to be the correct ends of politics in Israel/Palestine, in the U.S. and as a general matter. These ends include an equal claim to freedoms of speech, movement and belief for all, as well as the right to political voice, to self-government and to non-domination on the basis of group membership. A left that is confident about these aims—confident in its understanding of emancipation, and what a free and fair future would actually look like—is a left that will also be able to achieve clarity about its means. It may very well be that after, in Nelson Mandela’s words, a “calm and sober assessment of the political situation,” the ends of the left may require some measure of strategic violence—“sabotage,” to use Mandela’s term. But that violence must always be provisional, situational and subject to self-critique. I think the model of Mandela, and of the South African struggle more generally, is an important one for Israel and Palestine today. To adopt the South African model does not mean to renounce violence a priori, it means to renounce the refusal to decide about ends and to commit to a measured, even scrupulous approach to means.
Regarding Israel and Palestine, the aim of left action cannot be to terrorize Jewish Israelis, or to prevent the “normalization” of the occupation by refusing to acknowledge their existence. It is not the existence of Israelis that is the problem, it is their actions, refracted through the policies and actions of their state. Therefore, the aim of a liberatory left politics must be to change this behavioral calculus—to help Jewish Israelis to see that their own interests require securing for Palestinians the same freedoms that they themselves enjoy. As in the case of South Africa, this requires showing those currently in power that their interests are commensurable with, and in fact depend upon, respecting the autonomy of those they now violently dominate.
Israelis must be made to see that if they want to receive military aid from the U.S. and Europe, to compete in world athletics, to contribute to world culture and to enjoy the wealth of the world economy, they must end the violent domination of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. Not because one side is indigenous and good and the other settler-colonial and evil, but because Israel’s behavior is wrong by every standard except the right of the stronger. The left’s infatuation with flashing sabers, its flirtation with the idea that Jewish Israelis really should be driven into the sea—or that, at the very least, it is not our place to say that they shouldn’t—sabotages the clarity of ends and the efficiency of means that this gargantuan interest-realignment demands.
As I write these lines, there is a man-made famine killing children in Gaza. There are many tens of thousands of innocent people dead, and many hundreds of thousands homeless and immiserated victims clinging to bare life. The chief authors of this famine, and of the callous and criminal violence which accompanies it, are the ethno-supremacist government of Israel, its indulgent patrons in Washington and the leadership of Hamas. None of these is in any sort of thrall to the left ideologies I have set out to criticize. But this desperate situation only underscores the need for a left alternative that has purged itself of fantasies and illusions about violent means and why to use them. It’s time to let Fanon’s Algeria go so that the real task of liberation can begin.
Photo credit: Bora S. Kamel (CC BY / Flickr).
Is now really the right time to talk about the left’s political violence problem? Graduate students are being disappeared off the streets of college towns. American-made bombs have killed numbers of Gazan children greater than the circulations of n+1 and Jewish Currents combined. The far right is triumphant across the world and already turning the levers of state power against the under-documented and the overeducated.
Against this background, it seems risible to turn back to what Adam Shatz has called “the ethno-tribalist fantasies of the decolonial left, with their Fanon recitations and posters of paragliders.” Febrile delusions of nativists and reactionaries aside, the left’s fascination with violence, its Mangione memes and Sinwar graffiti, appears to have few real-life consequences outside the hurt feelings of some undergraduates and the ruffled feathers of those business and cultural figures who seem glad of the excuse to be able to finally defect to the rampant right.
And yet I am going to try to convince you that the left’s violence problem is serious and real. The left’s endorsement of political violence is most dangerous not for what it says—the actual arguments are frequently below reproach, and their effects on the social world remain relatively minor—but for what it does to the political horizons of the left today.
The left’s flirtation with political violence, with “the resistance” in Gaza, with unrealized uprisings at home, occupy the place where an understanding of effective means and a vision of emancipatory ends should be. As the critic Adam Kirsch observes in his recent polemic On Settler Colonialism, the left frequently supports the use of violence in situations where there is no feasible way in which violence can achieve its desired ends. In some cases, it refuses to even state these ends, leaving a negative space where a political vision should be.
For Kirsch, the clearest example of this confusion about means and ends was the celebration across the left of Hamas’s attack across the Gaza border in October 2023, an attack whose aims it is not clear the Anglophone left correctly understood, but whose violent methods it frequently celebrated. It was the events of October 7th and their reception that prompted Kirsch’s fusillade against what he takes to be the essential cause of the left’s confusion—its devotion to the doctrines of settler-colonial theory. Kirsch’s book sets out to show that the titular concept
Kirsch’s book certainly has its flaws. Chief among them is its blindness to the political realities of Israel, a state that was only ever something close to a liberal democracy for the six months between the end of military rule over Israeli Arabs at the end of 1966 and the beginning of the military occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in June 1967. It ignores the ironic truth that Israel is in fact a perfect example of an exploitative colonial state in its extractive and repressive settlement project in the Palestinian territories in the West Bank, and that these Israeli colonists could be returned to their metropole—Israel within the Green Line—were there only the political will to do it. And it is silent about the ways in which the Gaza war has long ceased to be a war of self-defense and is now wholly a war of territorial expansion and political expediency in the best case, and of ethnic cleansing and civilian annihilation in the worst case. These are serious mistakes about the situation in Israel, compounded by some glaring omissions and uncharitable readings of the scholarly canon he excoriates. Kirsch’s diagnosis of the political and ideological tendencies of the postcolonial left in the Anglosphere does not, however, depend on them.
Defenders of settler-colonial theory nevertheless accuse Kirsch of a feat of prestidigitation: taking a staid academic subfield devoted to explaining the history and sociology of colonization and its consequences and turning it, as Samuel Brody puts it in the Boston Review, into “a repository of everything that liberals, centrists, and conservatives have hated about radical academia since McCarthyism.” But Kirsch’s most important target, as the philosopher Michael Walzer notes in his review of the book, is neither the academic field of settler-colonial studies nor the state of the conflict in Israel/Palestine. Rather, Kirsch is after the “actual politics” that animates the anti-colonial left today. According to Kirsch, their political goal, decolonization, “is a zero-sum game, in which Natives win (land, sovereignty, power) only if settlers lose.” To quote the scholars Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, cited frequently by Kirsch, the claims of the colonized and the claims of settlers are in principle “incommensurable” and therefore not open to negotiation. If politics is the art of the possible, or as many since Aristotle have supposed, a science of living together, the politics informed by this brand of postcolonial theory is instead religious and, in the words of Frantz Fanon, Manichean: the triumph of good over evil by any means necessary.
Kirsch’s critics complain that he is making a strawman out of contemporary left political approaches. He is not. Kirsch’s critique makes good sense of the fruitless desperation of left-wing violence in the United States, as well as the global left’s often thoughtless support for violence in the Middle East. More damningly, it picks out patterns of thought now common in the leading left-wing organs of culture and ideas. I have chosen three such examples almost at random. I could have easily found a dozen more. But even among this richness of embarrassments, no writer exemplifies the obscurity of the contemporary decolonial left’s ends and the absurdity of its means more than Andreas Malm.
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If Malm did not already exist, Adam Kirsch might have had to invent him. For the uninitiated, Malm, a Swedish academic with a scruffy beard and kufi prayer cap (we’ll return to the prayer cap) is not a minor figure. He publishes with Verso, lectures in Paris and New York and provided the inspiration for the film How to Blow Up a Pipeline. Malm is particularly known for his dorm-room revolutionary approach to the climate crisis. Like a Scandinavian Malcolm to Greta Thunberg’s Martin, Malm urges his audience to take up arms in the name of “Fanonian” resistance to climate change; “destroying fences” at mining sites and the like, the sort of “violence of the sweetest kind” that leaves him “high for weeks.”
It would be hard to find a more perfect proof text for Kirsch’s thesis than Malm’s recent book, The Destruction of Palestine Is the Destruction of the Earth:
Two apparently unconnected problems—the Israeli occupation of Palestine and the climate catastrophe—are assigned the same hidden cause, and thus the same violent solution. A distorted picture of history grounds conspiratorial assertions. What Malm sometimes tries to cloak in the trappings of traditional scholarship—quotations from letters, maps and secondary research—is at its heart a metaphysical assertion of sameness. All catastrophes are interchangeable: the deforestation of the Amazon would be “a different kind of Nakba”; the Nakba of 1948 is commensurate with the coastal bombardment of Acre by the British; the political economy of coal in the 1840s is the same as oil in the 1970s is the same as Israeli natural gas platforms today. Gone are the subtle contingencies of Foucault and the careful demystifications of Hobsbawm. Instead, the explanatory principle here is one of “eternal recurrences,” repetitive cycles that can only be broken, we are told, by the physical destruction of colonial settlements.
Not all catastrophes, however, are equal: Malm insists that the anti-colonial struggle is actually prior to the environmental one and demands more radical tactics including “the targeting of human bodies,” because, although it is bad, “fossil capital is not a settler-colonial project.” Indeed, he is even willing to condone fossil fuels, albeit in the short term, so long as they are “mobilised for survival and liberation.” For Malm, the anti-colonial struggle is the definitive struggle: “I came to climate through Palestine.”
It might seem indecent to assign too much significance to the thinking and writing of a person who does not speak or read Arabic but attributes his thinking about international relations to “Sayyed” Hassan Nasrallah and “the best writings of Islamic Jihad,” or to attend too much to the intellectual worth of someone who calls Hamas’s totalitarian rule over Gaza “the most complete instantiation of … democracy anywhere between Beirut and Tunis.” But, unserious as he may seem, Malm offers us a paradigmatic example of a politics where everything is a decolonial nail and the hammer of violence is always ready to hand. Perhaps most worrying, given the quality of his thought and the implications of his politics, Malm is an influential figure in his own right.
In one recent example of this nascent Malmism, the legal scholar Amna Akbar wrote a piece for n+1 in which Malm and the jailed alleged assassin Luigi Mangione are glorified in a sort of diptych as the two visionary martyrs of modern politics. Akbar’s text is suggestive and confusing. Israel and Palestine are said to “loom over the conversation” when Malm is speaking, even when he is speaking about something else. Malm’s positions on Palestine suggest how he has “scrambled” the tired and corrupt nostrums of the mainstream media, who are “perturbed” if not outright threatened by his bold and daring statements. The New York Times is so shaken by Malm’s uncomfortable truths, Akbar insinuates, that they photoshopped his picture to make it look like he was wearing an Islamist kufi.
Here is the paradox of the postcolonial left in a knit skullcap: Akbar holds up Malm’s radicalism about Palestine as the font of his moral authority about the climate, and about politics in general. But she is quite literally unable to see the very hat he in fact wears on his head as a sign of this politics. The violence of the “Palestinian resistance” has become, for both Malm and Akbar, a cipher for radicalism itself, and the signifiers of radicalism are now free-floating, connecting fiscal policy, the environment, Islam and almost everything else. Akbar’s piece is an example of anti-colonial violence as the ultima ratio of left politics run wild, and her political vision helps to demonstrate precisely what the “actual politics” of the contemporary left looks like in practice when all problems and all the possible means to solve them are collapsed.
Malm may be Akbar’s prophet of violence, preaching the fire this time to the unheeding squares at the New Yorker and the New York Times, but it is Mangione whom she singles out as the first flowering of the homegrown resistance—the one who points the way toward our future praxis: “the conjuncture in a nutshell,” as Akbar calls him. The bulk of Akbar’s exposition of this conjuncture is a comparison between Mangione, the wealthy scion of Maryland country-club magnates, and James Johnson, a black autoworker on a Chrysler assembly line who shot his abusive foreman in 1970. This is another one of Malm’s “eternal recurrences”—the difference between a black laborer at the end of the American industrial era and a sexually frustrated, wealthy white man-child is washed away in the service of “radical critique.”
Akbar is characteristically coy about both the means and the ends suggested by her political commitments. “We are at a real impasse. In the tides of the 2008 financial crisis, we have learned that protest is not enough. Electoral organizing is riddled with contradictions. Popular sentiment is insufficient. Mutual aid does not go the distance. What will it take?” Malm and Mangione point the way toward violence, but Akbar won’t spell it out—a prime example of what Kirsch calls the postcolonial left’s avoidance of “the reality of their own desires.”
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When the unwillingness to make explicit the future consequences of one’s commitments is combined with a willingness to distort the past, all that is left is the fact of ideology itself, and of the myths that support it. In the case of the left’s ideological infatuation with violence, no myth is more powerful than the successful anti-colonial uprising of the Algerian Front de Libération Nationale (FLN), and no figure is more mythic than the FLN’s sometime spokesman, the psychiatrist and theorist Frantz Fanon. Fanon’s stature seems at times almost totemic. When trying to justify his call to kill settlers, Malm assumes that “just mentioning the name of Fanon should settle this question,” as if the mere invocation of Fanon’s dense chapter “Concerning Violence” from The Wretched of the Earth obviates any need for further argument. Brody castigates Kirsch for not having read Adam Shatz’s biography of Fanon “more carefully.” Here I agree with Brody. Shatz’s book, The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon, does indeed bear careful reading.
Shatz does the difficult work of trying to paint a complete portrait of a man who is often “chopped into little pieces,” in the words of Fanon’s secretary Marie-Jeanne Manuellan. Fanon was at once a brilliant theorist and a pioneering clinician, a self-conscious heir to the traditions of the French Revolution and one of the fiercest critics of the pieties and hypocrisies of Enlightenment liberalism. There are many lessons to be gleaned from Shatz’s biography, from the essential continuities between Fanon’s intellectual interests and his psychiatric work, to his interactions and confluences with contemporaries like Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Albert Memmi. One theme of the biography bears directly on Fanon’s posthumous role as the final arbiter of truth for the postcolonial left: his often troubled relationship to practical politics.
Fanon joined the FLN by way of his role as director of the psychiatric hospital at Blida-Joinville. As a spokesman, his first public duty was to lie about the FLN’s role in the massacre of over three hundred civilians in the village of Mechta Kasbah. Fanon would later write that “in the colonial context there is no truthful behavior.” But his revolutionary discipline had serious political costs. Of these, perhaps the most painful was Fanon’s complicit silence after the murder by factional rivals of his friend and mentor Abane Ramdane, one of the leaders of the secularist, democratic faction within the FLN’s leadership.
Fanon’s political career is a story of persistent marginalization, both as a non-Algerian but also as someone whose vision of an independent Algeria open to all its Muslim, French and Jewish citizens was out of step with a movement that was increasingly conservative and sectarian in character. Fanon’s own greatest political contribution to FLN ideology was his romanticization of the rural peasantry—“its wisdom, its refusal of the temptations of Western assimilation, its incorruptibility,” in Shatz’s words—as the heart of the progressive anti-colonial revolution. Here, as in the case of Ramdane’s murder, Fanon seems to have been something of a useful dupe for the forces of reaction. As the FLN member and historian Mohammed Harbi notes, centering the values of the rural populace ultimately helped the nationalist cadres of the FLN advance the socially conservative Islamic-nationalist project to which Fanon had been opposed. Fanon was an indisputably great thinker, but he was also something of a political naïf.
Arthur Asseraf, a historian of Algeria at Cambridge who knows all of this, nevertheless argues in Jewish Currents that we should not use historical hindsight to judge the Algerian case. “In retrospect,” the divisions between the progressive democratic and revanchist Islamist wings of the FLN “seem glaring, but in the midst of colonial repression, they mattered less than the struggle to resist annihilation.” But Asseraf, unwilling to extricate himself from the political logic of the contemporary postcolonial left, wants to go beyond a sympathetic historical understanding of the conditions under which historical figures act, and recommend a form of revolutionary naïveté for our current political predicament. Because actors in the past could not be certain about the consequences of their political commitments, we should feel comfortable with, perhaps even valorize, ignorance about the consequences of our own. Asseraf presents us with the facts of the Algerian case—the Jewish fellow travelers like William Sportisse (he could have also mentioned Fanon’s friend Alice Cherki) who were jailed or forced to flee the rising terror of the post-revolutionary authoritarian Algerian state—but he denies that we should draw any lessons from what happened in the past about what sort of postcolonial struggle might best embody the values of the left, how to support it and why. “I do not need to know what decolonization will look like in Palestine in order to fight for it. It is impossible to know such an outcome—and that uncertainty does not make it any less essential.”
It is undoubtedly true that battling the barbarities of the Israeli occupation requires tremendous will and commitment from both Palestinians and their allies. But it is also true that accomplishing this successfully, and at the lowest cost to human misery possible, requires precisely the sort of strategic and judicious weighing of means that Asseraf dismisses out of hand. And while asking a person in a bombed-out building to be judicious may be callous, asking the same of a professor in Cambridge seems obvious.
The lesson of Asseraf’s ponderous piece seems to be that it would be better not to know anything at all about the disappointments of Algeria, because such knowledge has the unfortunate consequence of constraining our willingness to act blindly, not to say violently, in the present. Asseraf denies historical knowledge to make room for revolutionary faith. He resurrects the old Algerian motto of “the suitcase or the coffin” as the fate of the settler class, though he lacks Malm’s temerity in directly endorsing violence. Instead, he reverts to principled ignorance. Against the “giant coffin that has swallowed Palestine,” we must embrace the “uncertain future,” whatever it may bring.
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We are left with a bit of a mystery. Kirsch has dissected the political paralysis in which the left finds itself, and we have traced this paralysis through the vacillations and intoxications of a few recent admirers of political violence. But we do not yet know what it is about violence that so entrances the professoriate and commentariat of the contemporary Anglophone left. Shatz’s biography of Fanon may be helpful on this point as well. As Shatz notes, Fanon’s attraction to political violence, to the “searing bullets and bloodstained knives” that he described as the “naked truth of decolonization,” was motivated in part by his own disdain for middle-class squeamishness, which was of a piece with his decisive rejection of his middle-class, French-educated origins. In Fanon’s latter-day celebrity, there is more than a soupçon of petit-bourgeois infatuation with “the mood of revolt, protest, and insubordination” produced by his writing.
Though born to a relatively well-off family on a quiet provincial island, Fanon was a decorated war hero and a colonial subject, intimately familiar with violence in its many forms, from both his patients and his own experiences. And some of his devotees have in fact taken up arms, joining revolutionary struggles on every continent except Antarctica. But his latter-day readers on the Anglophone left usually come to his ideas from a background even more sedate than Fanon’s own. They are mostly professors—of history, of human ecology, of law. They are citizens of the most developed countries and graduates of the best universities. Their familiarity with violence, with physical violence, is either incidental and anecdotal or caused by the temptation of the bored bourgeois to taste something of the dangers of the world (though of course never too much).
Only someone deeply alienated from the realities of violence could mistake Mangione’s cosplay class terrorism for James Johnson’s anguished act of desperation. Only someone for whom violence is the “sweetest” form of “high”—better than whatever club drugs they have in Malmö—could wear a Marxist Popular Front t-shirt with his Islamist headwear as he pledges his willingness to take orders from Hamas’s al-Qassam Brigades.
It is tempting to say that the left today is so cavalier about the “unknowable” consequences of violence because those consequences will never redound onto the campuses its members normally frequent. Of course, that is no longer entirely true. For the first time since at least the 1960s, segments of the radical left are indeed in physical danger—from cops called into heretofore sacred precincts; from immigration enforcement playing the role once played by the secret police and chekists. But the postcolonial left’s response to physical danger in its own backyard is not to double down on physical resistance, not to head for the suburban underground or the exurban maquis—it is, of course, to appeal to the due protections of the constitutional state. Liberalism for me but not for thee.
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I am confident in describing the psychology of the radical left and its biographical and functional immunity to the actual effects of violence because I am describing my own life and political practice. For the better part of the past decade, I have been active in nonviolent forms of civil resistance across the West Bank. The principal tool that I and my fellow activists use to aid the Palestinian citizens who bear the brunt of the settler assault is the functional inviolability of our own bodies. We are Jewish, holders of valuable foreign passports, or both. Settlers and the army know that to cause us any serious harm means to suffer the sort of media or judicial attention that their regular brutalization of Palestinians never produces. I, like Malm, remember the first frisson I felt at hopping a fence or facing a burly policeman in riot gear. I, unlike Malm, understand that I am a tourist in a violent country, that my very presence is testament to an immunity those I want to support would desperately like to have.
I and those I work with continuously face the fact that our nonviolent practice has failed to accomplish its aim. The occupation only grows worse. The ethnic cleansing of vast swaths of the Jordan Valley and Masafer Yatta (the latter lately the subject of the Oscar-winning No Other Land) only accelerates. This failure has grown even more dire in light of the even freer hand the settler class has been given since the election of the current government (and the government’s encouragement of murderous assaults and pogroms has doubled and tripled since October 2023). Considering this failure, shouldn’t I be more open to the Anglophone left’s entreaties to give war a chance?
Most successful nonviolent protest movements come with the threat, or the practice, of violence as an alternative. The most famous examples of this were in South Africa and Northern Ireland. But in these cases, the use of violence had a clear and precisely defined political end. Violence without the prospect of nonviolent politics is mere nihilism. Fanon placed his political faith in a mystical idea of the revolutionary peasant. The contemporary left is willing to place its faith in movements that it does not understand—like Hamas—and in acts of redemptive violence that have no concrete social meaning or strategic purpose.
In a recent interview with Haaretz, Rashid Khalidi, student of and successor to Edward Said as the chair of Middle Eastern Studies at Columbia, complained that the hard structural logic with which the left has become so deeply enamored “blinds some people to the need to find allies on the other side.” Kirsch and Khalidi, otherwise strange bedfellows, are united in their exasperation with the left’s exclusionary politics, which are maddening as well as self-defeating. As one leftist acquaintance confidently told me, “there is no Israeli left” as far as he is concerned, a position echoed in the Palestinian diaspora-based BDS movement’s decision to boycott both No Other Land and the Israeli-Palestinian left-wing movement Standing Together because of their Israeli participants. This rejection of any means that are not total and totalizing leaves the left ripe for the counterproductive consolations of symbolic violence. It also supports the assertion by critics of the left (like Kirsch) that the obscure ends of left politics are totalitarian rather than emancipatory.
Let me be clear about what I take to be the correct ends of politics in Israel/Palestine, in the U.S. and as a general matter. These ends include an equal claim to freedoms of speech, movement and belief for all, as well as the right to political voice, to self-government and to non-domination on the basis of group membership. A left that is confident about these aims—confident in its understanding of emancipation, and what a free and fair future would actually look like—is a left that will also be able to achieve clarity about its means. It may very well be that after, in Nelson Mandela’s words, a “calm and sober assessment of the political situation,” the ends of the left may require some measure of strategic violence—“sabotage,” to use Mandela’s term. But that violence must always be provisional, situational and subject to self-critique. I think the model of Mandela, and of the South African struggle more generally, is an important one for Israel and Palestine today. To adopt the South African model does not mean to renounce violence a priori, it means to renounce the refusal to decide about ends and to commit to a measured, even scrupulous approach to means.
Regarding Israel and Palestine, the aim of left action cannot be to terrorize Jewish Israelis, or to prevent the “normalization” of the occupation by refusing to acknowledge their existence. It is not the existence of Israelis that is the problem, it is their actions, refracted through the policies and actions of their state. Therefore, the aim of a liberatory left politics must be to change this behavioral calculus—to help Jewish Israelis to see that their own interests require securing for Palestinians the same freedoms that they themselves enjoy. As in the case of South Africa, this requires showing those currently in power that their interests are commensurable with, and in fact depend upon, respecting the autonomy of those they now violently dominate.
Israelis must be made to see that if they want to receive military aid from the U.S. and Europe, to compete in world athletics, to contribute to world culture and to enjoy the wealth of the world economy, they must end the violent domination of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. Not because one side is indigenous and good and the other settler-colonial and evil, but because Israel’s behavior is wrong by every standard except the right of the stronger. The left’s infatuation with flashing sabers, its flirtation with the idea that Jewish Israelis really should be driven into the sea—or that, at the very least, it is not our place to say that they shouldn’t—sabotages the clarity of ends and the efficiency of means that this gargantuan interest-realignment demands.
As I write these lines, there is a man-made famine killing children in Gaza. There are many tens of thousands of innocent people dead, and many hundreds of thousands homeless and immiserated victims clinging to bare life. The chief authors of this famine, and of the callous and criminal violence which accompanies it, are the ethno-supremacist government of Israel, its indulgent patrons in Washington and the leadership of Hamas. None of these is in any sort of thrall to the left ideologies I have set out to criticize. But this desperate situation only underscores the need for a left alternative that has purged itself of fantasies and illusions about violent means and why to use them. It’s time to let Fanon’s Algeria go so that the real task of liberation can begin.
Photo credit: Bora S. Kamel (CC BY / Flickr).
If you liked this essay, you’ll love reading The Point in print.