Over the past two months, as Israel has waged a genocidal war in Gaza, killing more than 19,000 people, more than a third of them children, Western philosophers have been criticized for their positions on the issue. These self-proclaimed exemplars of morality and ethics have either condoned war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and forced evacuations or taken ambivalent positions on them.
For example, on November 13, German philosophers Jürgen Habermas, Nicole Deitelhoff, Rainer Forst and Klaus Guenther issued a statement in support of Israel, rejecting the term genocide in reference to its actions in Gaza and asserting that the attack on Hamas October 7 aimed to “eliminate Jewish life in general.”
Habermas was subsequently the subject of controversy on social media. even who asked “do you condemn Habermas?” mocking the repeated insistence on condemning Hamas faced by Palestinians interviewed by Western media.
While Habermas’ position is hardly surprising, the writings of another European philosopher, Slavoj Žižek, have been disappointing given his previous statements on Israel-Palestine. So I ask here: do we condemn Žižek?
It is important to recognize that the Slovenian philosopher found himself in a difficult position. After giving a speech at the opening of the Frankfurt Book Fair on October 17, he was violently attacked and even accused of anti-Semitism. He was even heckled at the event for pointing out that “Palestinians are strictly treated as a problem.” The State of Israel offers them no hope, positively highlighting their role in the state in which they live.” Since then, he has gone to considerable lengths to try to defend himself from being falsely identified as an anti-Semite.
But in trying to navigate the genocide-laden environment of Germany and the rest of Europe, Žižek inadvertently betrayed his radical left aspirations.
Most of what he said in his speech first appeared in an article he published with Project Syndicate on October 13 under the title “The Real Divide in Israel-Palestine.”
In this article he writes “the situation requires historical context”, but then goes on to reduce “the situation” to a confrontation between “fundamentalists on both sides”; it speaks of the Israeli occupation and the “truly desperate and hopeless conditions facing Palestinians in Gaza and the occupied territories”, but reaffirms Israel’s “right to defend itself”.
Much of what he says in this article is disconnected and contradicts his previous writings on state terrorism, Zionism, peace, “hamatzav”, the two-state solution, or even criticism of American invasion of Iraq.
While linking the war in Gaza to “the mass of Palestinian Arabs who have lived in a state of uncertainty for decades,” Žižek fails to address the history of the ongoing Nakba and its importance for understanding the Extremist Zionist messianic ideology.
He also repeats a major talking point from the Israeli hasbara repertoire about Hamas’ role in undermining any possibility of peace, although he has previously identified Israel as the main actor undermining peace. Just two years ago, he wrote in an editorial published by RT that the extension of the occupation “is in Israel’s interest: they want the West Bank, but they don’t want to annex it because they do not want to grant it. Israeli citizenship to Palestinians in the West Bank.
He then used his pizza analogy to show how Israel constantly undermines the peace process: “The situation drags on and is sometimes interrupted by negotiations which a Palestinian participant described perfectly. The two sides sit at opposite ends of a table with a pizza pie in the middle, and while negotiating over how to share the pie, one side constantly eats “their” slices.
These contradictions in Žižek’s current analysis of Israel-Palestine are compounded by his inadequate analytical framework. In his article and his speech, he insists on reducing this genocidal war to a conflict between the two sides of the same fundamentalist logic, embodied by the words of Hamas leader Ismael Haniyeh and Israeli government minister Itamar Ben-Gvir .
However, Ben-Gvir’s ideology is not marginal in Israel; he simply does not lay out his intentions in the rhetoric of “democracy” and human rights the way Israeli liberals do. This reflects the entire fabric of the ethnocratic state of colonial Jewish apartheid. Official declarations of the intention to “neutralize” the Palestinians, destroy “human animals” and carry out a second Nakba are reflected in children’s songs about the “annihilation” of ordinary Palestinians and Israelis saying that they want “Gaza to disappear”.
Even liberal Israeli intellectuals like Yuval Harari – whom Žižek cites in his speech and writings and seems to regard as someone who discerns Ben-Gvir’s dangerous “fundamentalism” – openly support the ethnic cleansing of Gaza under the guise of “protecting the civilians.” In fact, this is the only difference between Israeli “fundamentalists” – as Žižek calls them – and Israeli liberals: the latter would simply like to wrap the same policies in the language of humanism to make them more acceptable to the world.
Žizek also insists that Israel has the absolute right to defend itself against Hamas. In a November 20 editorial published in The Philosophical Salon, he even declared that he “gave Israel the full right to destroy (Hamas).” A few lines later, he writes that he is in complete solidarity with the victims of the Hamas attack and the Jewish community, but does not support the actions of the State of Israel and its current administration. It is not clear how he can approve of Israel’s “right of self-defense” while refusing to support it.
More importantly, such a position is completely disconnected from his previous analyzes of settler colonialism and Zionist occupation. In March 2023, he wrote an article for Project Syndicate in which he argued that rightly condemning Russia requires that it is imperative “to be consistent and also condemn other examples, including the subjugation of Palestinians by Israel in the Occupied Territories.
As many commentators have pointed out, under international law an occupier cannot claim to defend itself against the population it occupies. In fact, the use of this word in a colonial context is code for ethnic cleansing and land grabbing.
Žizek’s Hobbesian equivocations on Israel’s “right to self-defense” cannot be excused as a defensive reaction.
Even more incomprehensible is his insistence on clinging in his writings to a certain liberal politics of hope in this catastrophic context. In a December 12 editorial he published in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, he sees change coming from “the slow rise of solidarity between Palestinian citizens of Israel and Jews opposed to the destructive war.”
But this noble, ambitious vision is completely disconnected from the realities on the ground. Palestinian citizens of Israel have been subjected to a brutal McCarthyist campaign of arrest, surveillance, intimidation and exclusion, even for calling for an end to the war. Any statement or activity that is not in support of this genocidal war is considered hostile and anti-Israeli.
Without a doubt, the fear of being painted under the demonizing brush of anti-Semitism is very real and cannot be overstated. It is used even against the Jewish people, as the controversy surrounding Masha Gessen’s receipt of the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought sadly illustrates. Gessen was attacked for writing in an article in the New Yorker that Gaza is “like a Jewish ghetto in an Eastern European country occupied by Nazi Germany.”
Despite his ambivalent position on the Palestinian genocide, Žižek should not be considered an irrelevant thinker. After all, the fundamental truths of many philosophies exist beyond the biographies of their authors.
I think Žižek is aware of his failures and may revise his position in his future writings. As he may know, it’s never too late to wake up.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Tel Aviv Tribune.