On Identification: Theses on Liberal Discourses about Zionism and Israel Since October 7

Much has been written and said in the last few months—since Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack—about Israel, Palestine, Zionism, the occupation, self-determination, nationalism and identity, human rights, racism and antisemitism, and the justification and/or legitimacy of violence and struggle. This discourse demands sustained analysis and theorization. I want to be clear that I’m writing here about US-centered, frequently liberal or left-identified discourse about Israel/Palestine, particularly since October 7, and especially as that discourse has proliferated in essays and the news and on social media that can be categorized as scholarly, intellectual, and/or academia-adjacent. And let’s be honest: social media is where a lot of this discourse has been taking place.

Beyond being an American taxpayer who helps subsidize Israeli policies of occupation, as an American Jew who is also a scholar of Jewish studies at a major research university I have been bombarded for decades with insistences from Jewish community professionals (including establishmentarian culture-crats of what has sometimes been called the Israel lobby) and their allies in the academy that my Jewishness necessarily implies—or maybe more accurately should imply—a nationalistic identification, or at least a significant relationship, with Israel as the Jewish state.[1] And this guidance is repeated by Israel itself, which has from its founding insisted it is not merely a sovereign state among others, but more specifically the state of all Jews everywhere, the “Jewish State,” a self-description it has consistently embraced from the Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel of 1948 to the so-called Nation-State law of 2018.[2] In what follows I reflexively inhabit this diaspora relationship. 

Thesis 1

To be sure, the October 7, 2023, Hamas raid on southern Israel was horrifying to those who experienced and witnessed it, but at the same time, its real terror must be understood as a fantasy fulfilled. For such horror has animated the ideological heart of Zionism all along: the attack was in fact precisely the fantasy that fundamentally organizes Zionist identification with Israel on both the right and the left. For the right, it was the terror-fantasy that Netanyahu, Likud, and their Kahanist allies have long stoked among supporters and would-be followers, the nightmare of Muslim and/or Arab savagery that could only be held off by the right’s vision of an ethnically pure, militarized society. Meanwhile, for the left, the attacks resolve as the realization of their own cautionary tale that has for decades underwritten arguments in favor of “land-for-peace” deals; but now, Palestinian fury, rooted in denied self-determination, has come back to torment all Israelis—even the “good” ones.

Across the political spectrum of Zionism—perhaps especially diaspora Zionism—the specter of a brutally violent eruption of Palestinian bodies always already haunts contemporary affective identification with Israel. Whether on the right or the liberal left, on October 7 Zionists in a sense got what they desired, the fantasy on which their political identity was premised. In either case it was the alienating realization as history of what had hitherto been an ideological instrument stabilizing their political identity. If keeping Israelis—and by metonymic extension Jews—safe has been the key part of the bargain for the supporters of Netanyahu’s coalition who weren’t strictly speaking theocratic fascists, this explosion-into-history of fantasy also stands as an assertive threat to left identification with the dream of coexistence, insofar as the liberal Zionist self-conception centers a self-satisfied, righteous belief that Palestinian violence would (or should) spare liberal Zionists. The horror of the attack is the horror of having the determining core of one’s identity realized as a historical reality no longer under the control of one’s desire.

Say what one will about him, but Slavoj Zizek’s early analysis of Freud’s “burning child” dream is clarifying here. As Freud explains it, a father had sat by his feverish child’s bed for days on end; when the child dies, the father retires to the next room to finally sleep, leaving the door open between the rooms so he could see the bed with his child’s body laid out, with candles surrounding it. An old man he engaged watched the corpse and prayed. Once slumbering, the father dreams “that the child is standing at his bedside, grasps him by the arm and whispers to him reproachfully, ‘Father, can’t you see that I am burning?’” At this point he wakes up, sees a light in the other room, and hurrying over “finds the old attendant fallen asleep, the shroud and an arm of the beloved body burnt by a lighted candle that had fallen across it.”[3]

Freud suggests that the dream functions both as wish fulfillment—his son is alive again—and as a way to prolong sleep even while conceding reality—that a fire had started—intensified by the unacknowledged guilt figured at once in the metaphorical association between the child’s “can’t you see I am burning?” and his fatal fever and in the father’s lingering concern about his choice to sleep (as Freud puts it, “Perhaps the father had carried into his sleep the worry that the aged attendant might not be up to his job”). The dream enables the father to temporarily defer a threatening reality (by overdetermining it)—that is, until that reality becomes too much to withstand and he wakes.

Following Lacan’s analysis,[4] however, Zizek argues for the opposite interpretation. It is not that the dream allows the father temporarily to escape reality, which is terrifying; rather, the reality the father experiences in the dream is more terrifying than the illusion he experiences in his waking life. The dream he constructs indeed allows the father to prolong his sleep,

[b]ut the thing that he encounters in his dream, the reality of his desire, the Lacanian Real—in our case, the reality of the child’s reproach to his father, ‘Can’t you see that I am burning?,’ implying the father’s fundamental guilt—is more terrifying than so-called external reality itself, and that is why he awakens. . . . He escapes into so-called reality to be able to continue to sleep, to maintain his blindness.

Zizek’s core point is that this is precisely the structure of ideology: “in its basic dimension it is a fantasy-construction which serves as a support for our ‘reality’ itself: an ‘illusion’ which structures our effective, real social relations and thereby masks some insupportable, real, impossible kernel.” Ideology’s function is not to offer an escape from reality “but to offer us the social reality itself as an escape from some traumatic, real kernel.”[5]

Just as the truth and trauma of the child’s words in the father’s dream is that he is already dead from the burning fever that the father may believe he could have done something to prevent, amplified by the guilt of having fallen asleep and left an incompetent guardian in charge, of knowing that he didn’t and still doesn’t see the actual fact that his child is “burning,” so the real trauma of October 7 for Zionists is that they have imagined it—and its imaginatively insupportable specter of their complicity in the fact of their own endangerment if not also in the unjust project of occupation—all along at the heart of the statist vision of Jewish normality and of their own identificatory self-conception.

A little later Zizek relates a dialectical joke about antisemitism that further explains how, as he puts it, “truth arises from misrecognition.” A Pole and a Jew are riding on a train in the early twentieth century:

The Pole was shifting nervously, watching the Jew all the time; something was irritating him; finally, unable to restrain himself any longer, he exploded: ‘Tell me, how do you Jews succeed in extracting from people the last small coin and in this way accumulate all your wealth?’ The Jew replied: ‘OK, I will tell you, but not for nothing; first, you give me five zloty [Polish money].’ After receiving the required amount, the Jew began: ‘First, you take a dead fish; you cut off her head and put her entrails in a glass of water. Then, around midnight, when the moon is full, you must bury this glass in a churchyard. . . .’ ‘And,’ the Pole interrupted him greedily, ‘if I do all this, will I also become rich?’ ‘Not too quickly,’ replied the Jew; ‘This is not all you must do; but if you want to hear the rest, you must pay me another five zloty!’ After receiving the money again, the Jew continued his story; soon afterwards, he again demanded more money, and so on, until finally the Pole exploded in fury: ‘You dirty rascal, do you really think I did not notice what you were aiming at? There is no secret at all, you simply want to extract the last small coin from me!’ The Jew answered him calmly and with resignation: ‘Well, now you see how we, the Jews. . . .’[6]

This is a joke about transference: for the Pole the Jew (who of course does what the Pole asks) embodies the knowing subject. When the Pole furiously explodes—“There is no secret at all, you simply want to extract the last small coin from me!”—he is, as Zizek puts it, “already telling the truth without knowing it.” While he sees in the Jew’s manipulation a “simple deception,” what he misunderstands is that “through this very deception the Jew kept his word, delivered him what he was paid for.” Or, as Zizek clarifies, “The Jew’s ‘secret’” lies in the Pole’s “desire”: the “fascinating ‘secret’ which drives us to follow the Jew’s narration” is “the chimerical object of fantasy, the object causing our desire and at the same time—this is its paradox—posed retroactively by this desire.” To traverse the fantasy is to “experience how this fantasy-object (the ‘secret’) only materializes the void of our desire.”[7]

The real catastrophe of October 7—the unexpected and surprising turn—was that this disaster was entirely expected and unsurprising.

Thesis 2:

Among the many obscenities of October 7 was the tidal wave of earnest shock that we in the US heard from liberal Zionists and those on the center-left who otherwise feel what I have seen described variously as an “affinity” with or “closeness” to Israel, which is to say people who in some way peg their identities (through, for example, family history, time spent there, ideological affiliation, and/or other modes of biopolitical engagement) to Israel, the Middle East’s only herrenvolk democracy. At work in this shock is a privilege that protects the bearer from needing constantly to register the weight of Palestinian suffering produced by, maintained for, and occluded in the experience of—and the celebration of the fetish of—Israeli (which of course in the Zionist imaginary is always a proxy for Jewish) normality.

I describe this shock as “obscene” for a couple of reasons. One is that it’s born of an ignorance that, by 2023, can justify itself only through entitled self-deception. There’s a poignant scene in Woody Allen’s 1986 film Hannah and her Sisters when one of those sisters, Barbara Hershey’s Lee—a sensitive bohemian/intellectual type always on a bit of an existential precipice—comes home from a tryst to the Soho loft where she lives with Max Von Sydow’s misanthropic artist Frederick, her lover and mentor, who, oblivious to her discontent, starts telling her about his evening: “You missed a very dull TV show on Auschwitz. More gruesome film clips, and more puzzled intellectuals declaring their mystification over the systematic murder of millions. The reason they can never answer the question ‘How could it possibly happen?’ is that it's the wrong question. Given what people are, the question is ‘Why doesn't it happen more often?’”

The discourses of mainstream US Zionism and Israel-identification similarly frame their own affective self-relation around a misrecognition. The shock expressed in the wake of the brutality of Hamas’s attack was that of a statist subject that had to that moment presumed that the monopoly on population-threatening violence was its own to exercise. Sure, Palestinians could throw stones and launch the occasional barrage of relatively inaccurate rockets, irritations for the Israeli security state, but only Israel had the ability, which in fact always resolves as the right, to exercise violence on a socially and symbolically disruptive mass scale. An ignorance that can only be described as colonial is at work in this belief that Palestinians lack at once the means to overcome a presumed Israeli military—and cultural—superiority and the conviction to try. (This has come into sharper focus since the late-November and early-December 2023 revelation that Israeli military and intelligence officials had obtained a copy of the precise plan Hamas was to execute on October 7, including fairly accurate assessments of Israeli military forces, a year before the attack but dismissed the blueprints as aspirational and beyond Hamas’s capabilities—and that an Israeli intelligence warning in July, just three months before the attack, that Hamas was conducting drill exercises that hewed close to what was outlined in those battle plans went similarly unheeded).

This is not to justify Hamas’s brutality—I have no interest in excusing the ferocious and merciless violence their fighters perpetrated on Israeli civilians—but it clearly does no one any favors to imagine that Israeli policies of despair do not have consequences, or that the victims of those policies might not be able to justify fighting back against them. Given the history of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, the real question after October 7 is “why doesn’t it happen more often?”

And this leads to a second reason I describe Zionist-aligned shock in the wake of October 7 as obscene: it is cruel. A couple of weeks after the raid—sometime in the middle of October—I heard an NPR News dispatch from Israel in which the reporter interviewed the mother of one of the people taken hostage from the Nova festival near Kibbutz Reim. As I listened, I marveled at how collected the woman sounded, how she had been able to maintain her composure in addition to manage an effort to locate her son in the face of what I can only imagine is unbearable grief, anxiety, and terror. But she made a claim that was so horrifying: “We just want to live in peace.”[8] The immediate implication was that Israel did nothing to provoke this inhumane attack, but of course the more fundamental implication is that Israeli wellbeing is more important than Palestinian well-being. It’s difficult to understand the October 7 shock of liberal North Americans who embrace an “affinity” with Israel as entirely free of those same implications.

Thesis 3:

On the Zionist and Israel-identifying left, the expressions of sorrow and grief registering the anguish of both Israelis and Palestinians, deeply invested in a politically cleansed discourse of affect, were an attempt to steer clear of laying blame, but this is an ethically, politically, and intellectually stunted position given years of Israeli policy toward Palestinians. Pronouncements that the October 7 attack was a “nightmare” and attestations of “heartbreak”—affective terms many of us saw repeated across social media beginning on the morning of October 7—despite whatever intentions may have given rise to them, evinced, at the end of the ideological day, a perspectival privilege and epistemological entitlement rhetorically pegged to Zionist reality and functionally insensitive to the daily Palestinian nightmare that has persisted for decades (especially in Gaza under blockade). Affective responses can so easily reinscribe the possibilities of violence and cruelty that they putatively decry. Intellectual and para-intellectual figures on the liberal-left, normally so attentive to the intersection of positionality, institutionality, and language use, need to do better.

We need to critically examine the gap between the goals and the effects of politically anodyne affirmations of anguish. Indeed, such emotional both-sides-ism in the wake of October 7 should probably be seen as willfully politically anodyne, given a situation that’s so obviously politically structured, and that has a history that’s been so intensively analyzed. I don’t pretend to understand what psychic needs might be satisfied by such posting—who am I kidding, it obviously has something to do with protecting one’s identity-cathexes from one’s political views, and vice-versa—but at least one of the primary effects is to cast the conflict as operating in some kind of phantasmatic natural realm beyond politics and history and therefore beyond the reach of change. We need to rely less on the sanction offered by the self-satisfied intention behind such affective practices and instead take more seriously their deleterious consequences.

One reason a de-politicized retreat into affect is toxic to intelligent analysis is that such a vocabulary doubles down on claims of innocent victimhood, and helps to normalize the framing of aggrieved “sides,” inscribing identity positions that are pre-political, self-evident, natural, or otherwise nonnegotiable, that has helped to perpetuate the Israel-Palestine conflict. Second, we should consider how presuming a right or privilege to express some kind of ostensibly non-political affect about a situation that is so absolutely political is, to say the least, insensitive to the lives of those who have no ability to choose when to be political or not.[9] Third, affect, like the identities with which it is inextricably bound up, can’t be argued with or compromised on, and it can’t be the object of a settlement. One is not asked to agree or not with affect. Affect asks only to be affirmed; to challenge affect is to reject the identity position from which it arises.

Finally, we might consider how a vocabulary of "heartbreak" or "nightmare," which reads everyone as a victim, ends up functioning not all that differently from calls for “thoughts and prayers”—specifically as a displacement of politics—that we (in the US) always hear from the right after mass shootings. We can obviously differentiate the respective intentions behind calls for empathy now and the regurgitations of Ted Cruz et. al. whenever an assault rifle goes to work in the US, but both function in their effects to displace the possibility of dissensus. To argue against empathy—anecdotal evidence to be sure, but my own experience provides an example—is to be dismissed out of hand. I’m of course not discounting the value of acknowledging emotions or grievance tout court, but when we allow affective responses to set the terms for responding to history we risk engaging in a deceptive nihilism.

The necropolitics of affect renders politics as identity—and therefore as non-negotiable. Once we decide to perform a scene of encounter on the stage of identity, it becomes intractable. This conflict perpetuates itself though heartbreak and the presumption of a sphere of human life invulnerable to politics and critical thinking. It’s going to reproduce itself through continued assertions of a privilege to operate in that affective sphere.

Thesis 4:

This is not a new insight, but it became freshly urgent again as Israel barreled into its catastrophic invasion of Gaza propped up by American political, economic, and popular support: it’s notable how American Zionist and Israel-identified discourse strategically deploys the trope of innocence (and the innocents) to simplify and restrict the ambit of publicly-allowable discussion. Proliferation of pictures of the Israeli hostages, and references to the rape and mutilation of Israeli victims, crowd out consideration of the grievable suffering and actual politics of Palestinians and therefore of analytical consideration of the conflict in its historical, experiential, and institutional complexity. We all recall the month or so when Zionists took to social media to reproduce images of the hostages and decry the ripping down of hostage fliers—facsimiles that had been put up in US cities, mind you, where their purpose was almost entirely ideological, and minimally humanitarian—in a performance whose primary function was to center Israeli/Jewish suffering and whose secondary (albeit still key) twinned function (I’m not talking about intent here) was, first, to impose a zero-sum Manichaean frame on October 7 and the Israeli military response, demanding that one choose either Jewish grief or Palestinian grief and, second, to erase any real distinction between those who tore down the fliers and Palestinians and, by biopolitical extension, the cause of Palestinian liberation. The one narrative displaces and reinscribes the other. Thus do ostensibly politically cleansed expressions of agony or heartbreak or justice do the very political work of establishing a hierarchy of victimization and therefore normalizing an epistemic privilege. 

Thesis 5:

The speed with which panicked attention to supposed calls for a “genocide against Jews” came to dominate political and intellectual debate about public speech since October 7 has crowded out any real chance for a serious conversation about freedom of speech generally or campus speech in particular, to say nothing of an opportunity to confront the problem of American anti-Palestinian, more generally anti-Arab, and Islamophobic prejudice. More fundamentally, it underscores the dangerous blowback from what has been an insufficiently considered identity politics-situated project on the left over the past several decades to administratively police language according to a presumed right to not be offended.

As far as I can tell, the specter of calls for genocide against Jews (on campus or off) originates in a particular Zionist response to the slogan “From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will be Free.” Long a rallying cry of the Palestinian liberation and national movements most often now representing aspirations for a secular democratic state in the region between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea (that is, what is now Israel and the Palestinian territories), its adoption by Hamas, along with some record of its use calling for dismantling the Israeli state as it currently defines itself—that is, as a state of and for Jews—has led some to believe that it is necessarily a call for the eradication of Jews in the area. [1] Whatever else one can say about it—and my point here is simply to point out that the slogan does not necessarily and/or self-evidently signify genocidal intent—this panicked belief displaces both secular humanist resistance to herrenvolk ethnonationalism and consideration of the fact that Israeli politicians have repeatedly employed river-to-the-sea discourse over the decades to express their vision of a Jewish ethno-state—Likud’s party platform calls for “Jewish sovereignty from the Jordan river to the Mediterranean  sea,” for example—and also that it is Israel that is actually pursuing an ethnically cleansing river-to-the-sea-strategy. But indeed, we should say some other things about it. One of those things is that the circulation of this bad-faith panic-discourse helps to impugn criticism of Zionism or Israel, and indeed the very possibility of Palestinian solidarity, as antisemitic. Another thing we could say about it is that the fear that the slogan is eliminationist is obviously an ideological transference of Zionism’s own zero-sum ethnonationalist framing of territory. Many politicians and culture-crats in the US (and elsewhere) have claimed that the slogan necessarily calls for dismantling the Israeli state. I suppose one could agree, at least to the extent that the slogan envisions a different kind of state than the herrenvolk democratic state that Israel currently is, but all that really demonstrates is the peril in embracing Zionism’s ethnonationalist insistence that Israel is “the Jewish state.”

The public displays of umbrage at the specter of a gathering storm on college campuses of genocidal rhetoric against the Jews—frequently, but certainly not exclusively, coming from the right—needs to be recognized as allied to the long-term rightwing hegemony strategy to dismantle higher education and refashion it as an arm of rightist political and cultural power. Performances such as the House Education and Workforce Committee’s hearing on December 5, 2023, in which the presidents of the University of Pennsylvania, MIT, and Harvard were questioned about speech on their campuses, provide a good opportunity to examine how the cultural project to delegitimize the critique of Zionist herrenvolk democracy as “antisemitic” proceeds by othering critics of Zionism as foreign, un-American (via the identification of Israel with the US that many critics have analyzed[11]), or otherwise nationally strange—note the intensive focus in this discourse on national and statist symbols like the kuffiyeh and the Palestinian flag, for example, which begs to be considered alongside the incitements of rightist ideologues such as Trump, DeSantis, Haley, Jordan, Hawley, etc. (the list is long) that certain modes of left academic knowledge production are “woke,” “socialist,” or otherwise “un-American”—and thereby deflects attention from the actual and far more clear and present homegrown threat of white supremacist antisemitism that in recent years has moved pretty close to the center of the rightist governing bloc here in the US. Recall that Elise Stefanik, who fresh from her star turn during the House committee hearing with the university presidents tweeted “One down. Two to go” and referred to the “pervasive rot” at “the most ‘prestigious’ higher education institutions in America” when Penn president Liz Magill resigned a few days later, and then tweeted “TWO DOWN. ONE TO GO,” “Claudine Gay is just the beginning,” and “A reckoning is coming to higher education” when Harvard’s president resigned in early January, is one of Trump’s leading champions in Congress and has legitimized and repeated antisemitic “great replacement theory” discourse—a theory that indeed now seems pretty common on the right.

All this is to say that Jewish students on some campuses have heard in their fellow students’ chants of “From the river to the sea” an implicit call for Jewish genocide, and therefore a reason to be afraid, and that many politicians, culture professionals, and intellectuals and para-intellectuals have seized on that affective fear for establishmentarian gain. I read recently—I forget where, and I’m paraphrasing—that hearing a call for Jewish genocide in the slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is like hearing the civil rights slogan “We shall overcome” in the mid-1960s and imagining it as a call to kill all white people. Undoubtedly some racist people back then did indeed hear a mortal threat in the sonorous chants of “We shall overcome,” but that doesn’t mean they were right to, and it doesn’t mean they deserved to be platformed.

Decades of legitimizing the policing of language in an effort to eradicate the potential to offend, paired with the elevation of the affective register as framing support for conceptuality, thought, and intelligence, has paved the road toward this state of affairs in which individual feeling—regardless of whether it’s justified, no matter how misguided or misplaced—has become the ultimate warrant for truth.

Thesis 6:

October 7 changed nothing. The agony and the terror and the heartbreak—and the policies that made it all possible—have existed for decades. The real question is what we choose to change for the future.