A prominent member of Hamas’s political bureau has been causing something of a stir on the internet in recent days. In an interview with the Lebanese television channel LBC, Ghazi Hamad vowed that given the chance, his group would repeat the October 7 massacre until Israel ceased to exist. It went viral.
To many people, the habits of bears in woods might spring to mind. But the context made the clip fly. In recent weeks, the public debate in the West has descended into an appalling maelstrom in which gullible westerners insist on projecting their own values onto Hamas, while increasingly small ranks of the sane try to snap them out of it.
It is impossible for devotees to view the Israel-Hamas conflict without donning the goggles of identity politics
One prank video showed Americans clamouring to sign a petition in support of the terror group, until they were read the terms and conditions, which included ‘you want a terrorist group that beheads babies and rapes girls to replace the only democracy in the Middle East’ and ‘you endorse making homosexuality punishable by jail or death’. Idiocy doesn’t even cover this darkest expression of Israelophobia.
Another astonishing video showed a woman imagining being kidnapped by Hamas, saying: ‘They would probably make sure I was OK. They would probably comfort me, make sure I had medical attention, make sure I was doing OK.’ Anything, in other words, but the rape, torture, beheading and mutilation that had been suffered by the other young women.
Given the depth and volume of such stupidity, the Hamad interview was disseminated by Israeli officials in a desperate attempt to dispel this mass wish fulfilment and explain why Hamas must be destroyed. It made the front page of the New York Post. But I’m not sure it worked all that well.
The most interesting part of the interview escaped most people’s attention, however. Towards the end, Hamad said: ‘We are the victims of the occupation. Full stop. Therefore, nobody should blame us for the things we do.’ Really? Even setting aside the fact that Gaza has not been ‘occupied’ since 2005, this remarkable statement – profoundly wrong in every single one of the assumptions upon which it rests – highlighted the Palestinian jihadism group’s entry point into western progressive sympathies: the cult of victimhood.
Oppression has become the most desirable social bauble on the left. The influx of identity politics from the United States has caused British liberals to embrace a hierarchy of race-based victimhood. Those suffering from the disadvantage of whiteness, meanwhile, have devised a way to haul themselves up the pyramid by hitching their identity to one of a bewildering array of sexual minority groups. That is the cultural dynamic that has grown to dominate social assumptions in Britain. It has led to the Labour leadership, police officers and footballers taking the knee, even while many black people – and the American football team – do not. If you thought that was bad, now it has led to the bizarre state of affairs in which the more progressive you are, the more likely you are to support Hamas.
Identity politics has always been the racial wing of hard-left ideology. Decent figures like Martin Luther King Jr, Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin were not interested in Marxist power structures or rising up against white Americans. They simply desired to be seen as equal citizens. As Ellison wrote in his seminal novel Invisible Man: ‘America is woven of many strands. I would recognise them and let it so remain. Our fate is to become one, and yet many.’
Yet when the radicals like Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael and the Black Power movement became the dominant force in the race struggle, they popularised the idea that black people were not American, but part of an international African nation. This offered the ideal vehicle for a Marxist, internationalist, revolutionary instinct, wrapped in the discourse of race.
Take one of the most prominent of these figures, William Du Bois. A founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP), he grew more radical throughout his life and by the time he died in Accra in 1963 – an event so significant that it attracted condolences from numerous world leaders – he had declared his intention to renounce his American citizenship and declared himself a communist.
Being black in America, as Du Bois saw it, was an experience of ‘double consciousness’, a kind of split-personality syndrome. The two competing identities could not be resolved, he argued; the only solution was to discard Americanness entirely and replace it with solidarity with oppressed black people everywhere. This divisive ‘pan-Africanism’, which stemmed not from the spirit of conciliation but of revolution, was born from hard-left ideology. As Tomiwa Owolade has pointed out, all the leaders of this movement, including Du Bois, were educated in the west, not in Africa, and their radical politics and sensibilities were an expression of a western socialist milieu, not African culture.
As I have explored in detail elsewhere, including in my book Israelophobia, from 1967 onwards, the Soviet Union pumped out huge volumes of propaganda aimed at undermining the Jewish state. Building on existing antisemitic tropes, it succeeded in presenting Israel as a colonial, white supremacist, racist state that practised ethnic cleansing and apartheid. Although none of this is true, it insinuated itself into the bloodstream of leftist politics in the west, and from there seeped into the mainstream. It also began to course heavily through the veins of the radical racial movement.
Fast forward to today and this blend of identity politics and hard-left ideology has been adopted as the new orthodoxy of the elites. It is enforced downwards upon the public from the very top of our institutions, from universities and the civil service to museums and advertising agencies in the form of rainbow lanyards, unconscious bias training and the zealous pursuit of ‘diversity’. It is also projected onto every social struggle, both at home and abroad. It is impossible, therefore, for devotees to view the Israel-Hamas conflict without donning the goggles of identity politics. Hence the drive to reimagine Hamas as Robin Hood and his Merry Men.
To make matters worse, the sound and fury that is unleashed towards Israel – which is always far more intense than that directed towards any other conflict, even those involving far worse human rights abuses – stems from the social justice movement’s problem with Jews.
Although they are persecuted for their race, Jews are perceived to hold malevolent and supernatural power over the financial markets, media and world affairs. Also, many of them appear to be white, troubling the simplicity of the radical worldview upon which the entire edifice of identity politics is constructed. The solution is to drain Jews of racial significance – think Whoopi Goldberg blathering that the Holocaust was ‘not about race’ because it involved ‘two groups of white people’. In fact, so powerful are the Jews in their minds that they have labelled them ‘hyper-white’. (In 2018, a man called Mark Winston Griffith, executive director of the Black Movement Center, said that attacks on Jews in Crown Heights was due not to antisemitism but ‘a form of almost hyper-whiteness’.)
While Jews are cast as hyper-white therefore, those non-white victims of white capitalism, including victims of ‘oppression’ like Hamas, are hoisted up the pyramid and given coveted spaces towards the top. Their jihadism didn’t emerge ‘in a vacuum’. The white man – or the hyper-white man – made them do it. As the gender studies scholar Judith Butler ridiculously put it 20 years ago, ‘Hamas and Hezbollah are social movements that are progressive and are part of the global left.’
The desire to fashion Hamas in its own image is one of the most egregious expressions of the narcissism of the contemporary progressive movement today. So narcissistic is it, in fact, that it is insensible to its own absurdity. Do I need to mention Queers for Palestine and the fact that gays are pushed off roofs in Gaza? But in the context of radical leftism, turning a blind eye to the brutality of the supposed underdog is hardly a new idea. John Rees, a leading figure in both the Stop the War Coalition and the Socialist Workers Party, spelled it out in his book 30 years ago. ‘Socialists should unconditionally stand with the oppressed against the oppressor, even if [the oppressed] are undemocratic and persecute minorities, as Saddam Hussein persecutes Kurds and Castro persecutes gays,’ he wrote.
This toxic blend of modern racial and sexual politics and traditional hard-left ideology is one of the main explanations for the love affair between the progressive movement and Hamas. And it underlines why this poisonous dogma must be resisted in all its forms, wherever it raises its head. The culture wars are real. Pick a side.
Jake Wallis Simons is editor of the Jewish Chronicle and author of Israelophobia: The newest form of the oldest hatred and what to do about it
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