Paul Berman has a long piece at Quillette, originally written this spring and published in Liberties magazine, on Frantz Fanon, Stokely Carmichael, and the roots of the uproar over Zionism. A couple of extracts:
The black perspective, then, in regard to Zionism—what was it? What should it have been? In recent decades, the black liberation struggle has acquired a worldwide prestige that Fanon could only have fantasised about. The black struggle has become the modern ideal of a righteous struggle for a better world. And in the context of this development, the anti-Zionist movement, beginning in a small way in the 1960s, and continuing in a large way in the years after 2000, has taken to arguing that, in the modern age, Zionism ought to be seen not as one more liberation struggle, but as the enemy of liberation struggles. Zionism ought to be seen as a participant in the white-supremacist and colonialist movements that oppressed blacks in the past. Zionism ought to be seen not as an enemy of Nazism and its systematic exterminations, but as a counterpart to Nazism. And anti-Zionism, by contrast, ought to be seen as the heir and brother of the black struggle. Or better still, anti-Zionism ought to be seen as indistinguishable from the black struggle, given that Zionism is white supremacism itself. The success of this argument has been, of course, extraordinary in different parts of the world, which is why on various continents the anti-Zionist cause has acquired the supreme moral prestige of our moment, not just in the universities.
But someone with an orientation like Fanon’s can only notice that, amid the worldwide din on behalf of the anti-Zionist cause, the actual black liberation struggle—the struggle by actual black people, that is—has once again, exactly as in the past, been drowned out by non-black voices. And everyone knows this to be true, and pretends not to know, in a classic display of Sartrean bad faith. The largest ethnic horror of the last several months has taken place, after all, within the Arab world, but not in the poor stricken corner of it that is Gaza. The ethnic horror has been the sustained assault on the Masalit people of Sudan, who are black, conducted by the predominantly Arab forces in Sudan’s renewed civil war, with disastrous consequences—all this in the context of the larger Sudanese war in which nearly eleven million people have been driven from their homes, and hunger and even starvation face a still larger number, and, according to a State Department official (as reported by Nicholas Casey in the New York Times), as many as 150,000 people may have been killed. I say that everyone knows this because these events do get reported, not just in obscure human-rights publications, but in the world’s most influential newspapers.
But the anti-Zionists have succeeded in commandeering the language of black liberation, and they have used the language to drown out the actual blacks who are suffering. To drown out the cries of victims in other parts of the world has been a main function of the anti- Zionist movement for many years now.
So, where are we now? – and what is to be done?
But everything about the prevailing climate of opinion in corners of the academy and in the world of the arts makes it difficult to look the various complexities and nuances in the face. So there are a great many people who gaze at Israel and prefer to see South Africa and its past. They do not see one more bloodbath in a history of even larger Middle Eastern bloodbaths. They prefer to see what the Islamists have always claimed to see, which is the crime against God, or the maximum crime of crimes, namely, an outright extermination of an entire people, such that “genocide,” the word, has become a catch-phrase. They see the Jews as Nazis, which has been a theme of the Islamist hysteria against Zionism for many decades. They decline to see anything at all about Hamas’s nature, doctrines, and practices, even if they do see those things. They see that resistance to what they imagine to be white settler-colonialism is righteous, and self-defence is monstrous. And the 7 October massacre seems to them—such is the logic, it is inescapable—a good thing, not just on balance. The 7 October massacre is a good thing absolutely. A good thing in the name of humanitarianism. And in the name of enlightenment, no less. It is a good thing, morally speaking, or psychologically speaking. An occasion for joy. Which some people express openly, even while denying that they want to kill the Jews; and other people merely infer, while denying they are inferring anything of the sort; and other people claim to oppose, but infer anyway.
The celebration of bad faith reaches its acme in the dreadful chants, “From the River to the Sea” and “Globalise the Intifada,” which mean, of course, the reduction of fifty percent of the world’s Jewish population to statelessness (in the first instance) and a worldwide terrorist campaign against Jews (in the second instance)—but which, we are told, mean, instead, “human rights for Palestinians” and “spirited worldwide protest.” Except that everyone knows that, on the contrary, those slogans are ventures into transgression, which is why young people like to chant them. And no one wants to acknowledge what the transgression is. And no one wants to acknowledge how shocking it is that, in the United States and in France and perhaps in other places, a mass movement of students, led by the student elite, has arisen in favour of those unacknowledged transgressions.
What should the universities do? I would mobilise my imaginary committee to confront the broader climate of opinion as a whole. This would mean recognising that the wave of virulent campus anti-Zionism, hidden and overt, together with the wave of virulent hatred in the art and literary worlds, amounts to something more than a failure of civility. It is an intellectual crisis. And the source of the crisis is not the students, and not a handful of radical organisations, either, even if the radical organisations are awful. Nor is the source merely the handful of professors who look and sound crazy. The source is a series of doctrines and assumptions that have degenerated from something authentically interesting into something grotesque, quietly presided over by professors who look and sound not just reasonable but attractively up-to-date. It is a development similar to the intellectual degeneration many decades ago of the brilliant and fiery Stokely Carmichael, except on an enormous university scale.
Stokely Carmichael, as Berman reminds us, was asked by David Frost, in a 1970 interview, who among white men he most admired. His answer? Hitler.
Mick Hartley 