On Adam Shatz's "Vengeful Pathologies"

How liberal intellectualism fails Palestinians

I am republishing this piece in light of how badly this article by Shatz in the london review of books has aged in the last few months. It is even worse now in hindsight than it was then so many months ago.

This piece is a short response to Adam Shatz’s article, vengeful pathologies, which can be found here https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n21/adam-shatz/vengeful-pathologies I have sat on this piece for some weeks, weighing up whether speaking in these ways ruins my standing in a country openly hostile to people like me, but I have to speak out on this, because it is troublesome to delude ourselves in liberal fantasy making.

Firstly, as a South African, the proposed “democratic, federation, or two-state solution” in Adam Shatz’s “Vengeful Pathologies” piece both fascinates and enrages me to no end. I have read countless articles on what people would propose it looks like, and I am left more perplexed and more enraged after every single one. I have seen what happens with the formation of a democratic republic on the basis of fallacious reconciliation and the fantasies of rainbow nationhood and postapartheidness. Secondly, I am absolutely horrified by the logic of people like Yuval Noah Harari in an interview with Rosemary Barton from CBC filmed on the 22nd of October and also published on Harari’s YouTube channel in which Harari opens up nearly immediately talking about a proposed normalizing of relations between the Arab world and Israel that were being negotiated, and how it was against the will of Hamas and therefore the attack happened. I am not going to grovel here to make my argument, I mourn the ugly loss of Israeli life at the hands of Hamas and at the hands of their own IDF. But for Harari to make this argument, he must live in some kind of fantasy world where the Saudi Arabian state, who were apparently in negotiation with Israel to normalize relations, actually cares about the region and not just the continued enrichment of their state, with their sportswashing projects ongoing while continuing the project of unfettered capitalist expansion in the region. If Saudi Arabia were interested in helping the Palestinians and stabilizing the region, this could easily have been done a long time ago and with far fewer Palestinians being massacred.

To give some initial context, what does apartheid mean? And where do I stand on the use of naming what Israel is doing as apartheid? Firstly, apartheid is an afrikaans word literally meaning apart-ness or separateness. It is the existential quality of being apart from the undesirables, in this case what the National Party of apartheid South Africa would have called anything from natives to bantu, to blacks, to kaffirs, darkies, hotnotte, kleurlinge, cape coloureds, and so much more. We still hear so many of these names ring out, though some people don’t take offense to words like kleurling or coloured, but that’s for another piece to unpack. Hendrik Verwoerd, one of the primary masterminds of the apartheid regime, and literal nazi supporter, viewed apartheid as a system of, in his words, “good neighbourliness”. And for him this really just meant the violent expulsion of all but white people from the most desirable neighbourhoods to the outskirts of towns or into the bantustans, with enough kept close enough or brought in so that their labour could be exploited at near slave wages. But because of this, because of my intimate understanding of apartheid South Africa, it is clear to me that apartheid is only part of the naming for what Israel is busy with, but that it also extends far beyond that. While apartheid South Africa saw some kind of sick protestant inspired nonsense about taming the people of Southern Africa, seeing themselves as overlords and masters of all black peoples, Israel sees only the absolute destruction of a people, and their absolute assimilation or permanent exile as a livable final result.

To me it seems simply that as long as Israel exists as it exists right now, a nuclear state with the power to wipe out the entire region with the backing of the west, the solution proposed by Shatz in his article in the London Review of Books, titled “Vengeful Pathologies” only means constant precarity for any Palestinian living in what would be Palestinian land then, because Israel will continue to have its excessive military might, and the backing of the entire western world’s states behind them. There is absolutely no way that a Palestinian people could live in justice and relative peace while the thumb of Israel still holds them down. The idea of sharing a land stolen from people, as we are currently still watching unfolding with the theft of land by Israeli settler colonialists in the West Bank, is wild to me. The land of the Palestinians was taken by force and continues to be taken by force every day for the last 75 years. Israel is calling for another Nakba, another project of absolute extermination, something even the apartheid South African government would have said is a step too far because they knew they wanted the cheap and exploited labour. Israel, on the other hand, sees no need for the existence of Palestinians, unless they capitulate and take up a second-class citizenship in Israel that permits them an apart existence. I am perplexed by the arguments of Adam Shatz, I must say, because there is no way that you can negotiate any kind of settlement with a state that only sees a people as a pestilence on the land, vermin to be exterminated.

Here are some of Shatz’s own words, right towards the end of the piece, that I find the most unrelentingly based in some kind of theoretical fantasy outside of the current reality we live in:

“A responsible American administration, one less susceptible to anxieties about an upcoming election and less beholden to the pro-Israel establishment, would have taken advantage of the current crisis to urge Israel to re-examine not just its security doctrine but its policies towards the sole population in the Arab world with whom it has shown no interest in forging a real peace: the Palestinians. Instead, Biden and Blinken have echoed Israel’s banalities about fighting evil, while conveniently forgetting Israel’s responsibility for the political impasse in which it finds itself. American credibility in the region, never very strong, is even weaker than it was under the Trump administration. On 18 October, Joshua Paul, who had been the director of congressional and public affairs for the State Department’s Bureau of Political-Military Affairs for more than eleven years, resigned in protest over the administration’s arms transfers to Israel. A posture of ‘blind support for one side’, he wrote in his resignation letter, has led to policies that are ‘short-sighted, destructive, unjust and contradictory to the very values we publicly espouse’. It’s no wonder the only Arab state to criticise Al-Aqsa Flood was the United Arab Emirates. American double standards – and the pitilessness of Israel’s response – have made it impossible.

The inescapable truth is that Israel cannot extinguish Palestinian resistance by violence, any more than the Palestinians can win an Algerian-style liberation war: Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs are stuck with each other, unless Israel, the far stronger party, drives the Palestinians into exile for good. The only thing that can save the people of Israel and Palestine, and prevent another Nakba – a real possibility, while another Holocaust remains a traumatic hallucination – is a political solution that recognises both as equal citizens, and allows them to live in peace and freedom, whether in a single democratic state, two states, or a federation. So long as this solution is avoided, a continuing degradation, and an even greater catastrophe, are all but guaranteed.”

I am particularly perplexed by this closing statement, as it assumes there is any possibility of convincing the Israeli state and their allies’ decision makers that they must see the humanity in the Palestinians, where the category of human was always already totally removed from any association with Palestinians. We hear it in their language, calling Palestinian people “human animals”, using the language of barbarity or pests on the land. The project is total extermination because there is no use value for the Israelis in Palestinians, so even on the level of a negotiated settlement on the basis of the usefulness of Palestinians is impossible. Shatz’s insistence on the solution as the “democratic state, two states, or a federation” as a moral necessity and a dissolution of violence as the only possible way to get there is in and of itself a moral contradiction and an absolute failure on the part of an otherwise vital thinker on the matter. We have to hope, we have to dream, of course, but since Israel has shown us for nearly a century, we cannot base these hopes and dreams on fantasies of converting an absolutely relentless violent state into a state guided by a moral principle.

No, this is simply a terrible, vacant, liberal position. The Palestinians, in the minds of Israeli decision makers, have been transformed into a living thing on the land that needs to be wiped out if they are to feel a little more comfortable with their own living situation. Again, then, this is different to the South African context and to South African apartheid, where racial capitalism was at the core of the decisions of the nationalist white supremacist National Party of Verwoerd and De Klerk. In other words, they had a limit on the amount of exterminating they would do, but they would force black people off their lands and into hinterlands or onto the outskirts of cities to do all the labour. They, therefore, could not fully decimate what they only saw as a burden but also as their labour source. But here, Palestinians represent nothing more than absolute nuisance, so for Shatz to insist on “democratic state, two states, or a federation” as a solution is a level of delusion I cannot comprehend and seems to be the luxury of people who have little to lose. What happens in the “democratic state, two states, or a federation” solution? Will Israel allow Gazans to move freely to the West Bank? Will Israel stop all of its blockades? Will Israel stop preventing Palestinian people from fishing the waters, already dying of the ecoterrorism by the Israeli state? Will all people have equal rights and equitable access and will there be reparations and the right to return for all the exiled Palestinian families who suffered under this project of extermination? Ultimately, will Gaza and the West Bank finally be directly connected again, or will it continue to be cleft in two by Israel and its military forces? No, Shatz’s position is immoral because it assumes that there is the possibility of a negotiated settlement on some kind of recognition of humanity. Look what the negotiated settlement did to the majority of black South Africans in the years leading up to and directly following 1994 in South Africa: it was arguably the most violent and volatile period in our history exactly because of the national party and its white supremacist and capitalist allies, including Israel, and though the first democratic election brought some hope, these hopes were soon dashed by the realization that for most black South Africans, the status quo would continue unrelentingly.

Before closing this piece I want to think about vengeance in the ways Shatz deploys it. To Shatz, and to the world of liberal politics, vengeance is an ugly thing that we should always permanently be ashamed of, something to feel guilt about feeling at all. It is a concept marred and maligned by definitions that decidedly place it only ever in the realm of an illogical retribution. This seems, to me, an oversimplification, and in many instances anti liberatory and against any sort of justice. The shame means we hide the idea that we feel these feelings, too scared to even think it out loud because the worlds of white liberals especially would be shattered, and in turn they would shatter ours, if they were to catch wind of the thought that we feel this way. As South Africans, we have seen it with the truth and reconciliation commission and the myth of the rainbow nation, in Palestine we are seeing it with the ways in which Palestinians are abused online for expressing any kind of rage and need for justice.

I have not lost hope. I am of course hopeful. But my hope is not based on some self-soothing idea that somehow Israel will be convinced of the humanity of Palestinians. As a scholar of the black world, I know all too well that convincing a colonizer of the humanity of the colonized is a futile exercise. The category is bereft of meaning for the colonizer in any case, because as Cesaire and Fanon both show us, the colonizers have to turn themselves into the most vile version of themselves in order to perpetrate this extent of violence, and they have trained for it for centuries before exacting it on black and brown peoples of the world. What I remain hopeful for is the unending struggle for liberation of all of our people, with hope and dream and art and music at its center, but not stalled by inane fantasies like Desmond Tutu’s post TRC rainbow nation dreaming or Shatz’s hope of a solution based on a convinced and humane Israel.

We have too much left to do together to be delayed by these moralisms that have no foundation in the world. Our people are dying. Palestine is being razed to the ground in front of us. This is the most glaring case of colonial extermination practices actively going on in the world right now, and we are bearing witness to it while so many cheer or silently watch on. Israel is not only a zionist ethno-nation-state, but it is also antisemitic in its foundation. It requires the permanent desecration of Jewish life to justify its existence and its relentless violence not only against Palestinians, but elsewhere too. Reconciliatory tropes will not rescue us from anything, ask any South African.