Mick Hartley

Fathom again. Here's Derek Spitz on the astonishing celebration across leftist academia of the Hamas Jew slaughter: The Professors and the Pogrom: How the theory of ‘Zionist Settler Colonialism’ reframed the 7 October massacre as ‘Liberation’.

Joseph Massad, professor of Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History at Columbia University, writing in The Electronic Intifada on the morning after the 7 October massacre, spoke of ‘an innovative Palestinian resistance’ in ‘stunning videos’ of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood. For him this was ‘the Palestinian war of liberation.’ Readers were invited to marvel, with Professor Massad, at the ‘shocking success of the Palestinian offensive,’ the ‘major achievement of the resistance,’ its takeover of several ‘Israeli settler-colonies near the Gaza boundary and even as far away as 22kms, as in the case of Ofakim’. …

Lake Micah, an Assistant Editor at Harper’s Magazine, put it this way: ‘to search for an analogue seems almost inappropriate to Palestinians’ world historical (!) audacity to seize the components of self-determination for themselves, if only because the idiom of liberation invents itself anew with each instance that the yoke of bondage is sloughed off … a near century’s pulverized overtures toward ethnic realization, of groping for a medium of existential latitude – these things culminate in drastic actions in need of no apologia, the thrum of history as it develops is one of force; its inertia and advance require some momentum.’

Phew.

Professor Gilbert Achcar in the department of Development Studies at SOAS, blogged that the ‘amazing and highly daring’ ‘counter-offensive (sic) launched by Hamas’ was ‘a much more spectacular feat’ than the October 1973 war. Going full supersessionist, Professor Achcar rhapsodized that it ‘evokes the boldness of the biblical David in his fight against the giant Goliath’; that Hamas ‘fighters’ ‘executed an amazing and highly daring offensive…’ and that ‘it is not difficult to understand the ‘enough-is-enough’ logic behind Hamas’ counter-offensive (sic).’ Professor Achcar did go on to criticise Hamas from a tactical and strategic point of view (although not, mind you, from a moral point of view) by pointing out that the belief Hamas could achieve victory through intimate mass murder was ‘magical thinking’, the stuff, as it were, of dreams.

Professor Ashok Kumar, senior lecturer of political economy at Birkbeck, posted on twitter/X (since deleted): ‘Sometimes partying on stolen land next to a concentration camp where a million people are starved has consequences.’

Dr Shahd Hammouri, lecturer in law at Kent Law School, wrote that: ‘Resistance by the Palestinian people by all means available at their disposal against an illegal occupying power is a legitimate act.’

Other professors have screamed ‘Go Back to Poland!’ at Jews and torn down posters of the Israeli hostages….

So how did parts of the academic left reframe the worst antisemitic pogrom since the Holocaust as ‘resistance’ and ‘liberation’? In part because it now views the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through the lens of ‘settler colonial studies’ and the entire history of the Zionist movement and the Jewish State as ‘Zionist Settler Colonialism’ This paradigm divides the world into a crude and unbridgeable binary of colonisers and the colonised, oppressor and oppressed, ‘whites’ and ‘people of colour’. It presents itself as a form of ‘engaged’ scholarship, but settler colonial studies also reframes and embraces a very particular form of violence – the kind of violence Hamas perpetrated on 7 October, pogromist violence without restraint or limit….

But read it all.