Žižek as Bosniaks: Although he condemned Hamas terrorism, he was accused of antisemitism for supporting Palestine

Identity wars force a simplification of reality, reducing it to a dichotomy of eternal conflict with an inherent logic of us or them. If the famous, often mentioned, "historical experience" teaches us anything, it is the insight that in such a conflict there will be no winners.

By: tacno.net

1. Post-imperial Legacy

The Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the new hundred-year war of our time, which has escalated again this month, has completely captured media attention and pushed aside the war of aggression that Russia has been waging against Ukraine for almost two years. As different as these conflicts are, from a cultural perspective, two interconnected elements are key in both cases: territory and identity. Russia officially justified its aggression against a sovereign country with denazification, which is nothing more than a code for the destruction of the Ukrainian state and Ukrainian identity, while at the core of the Israeli-Palestinian war, since its beginnings under British colonial rule, lies the fact that two peoples claim sovereignty over the same space. And again, despite all the undeniable differences, both conflicts have a similar framework: they are undoubtedly post-imperial wars in which the conflict lines run through the territories of former empires: in the Russian-Ukrainian war, the nucleus lies in the collapse of the Russian-Tsarist or Soviet empire as an extension of the former, and partly of the Habsburg Monarchy, while the roots of the Palestinian-Israeli war go back to the last phase of the Ottoman Empire. Thus, unresolved post-imperial legacy is the origin of today's conflicts, which, due to their intensity, due to unprecedented media, political, and military mobilization, not only of the direct participants but also of powerful allies on all sides, and due to the fact that they are happening in parallel, threaten world peace. It turns out that the physiognomy of today's global order has many similarities with the situation before World War I, which, as historian Christopher Clark writes, no one actually wanted, at least not on that scale, but into which all relevant actors nevertheless entered, driven by the fatal force of a chain reaction. Clark uses the metaphor of a sleepwalker for the title of his famous book, a subject who, driven by some internal automatism, and in the absence of awareness, moves towards some vague goal, which can also be a precipice, into which they will eventually fall.

In the wet dreams of Russian neofascism, for example in the new writings of Alexander Dugin, such an apocalyptic scenario has already been described[1], which also includes the use of nuclear weapons, which are potentially present in both wars. A particularly important aspect of these apocalyptic scenarios is religious-identity mobilization, which will convert seemingly limited territorial wars into conflicts between civilizations. Let's remember that Dugin himself, at the beginning of the Russian aggression against Ukraine, interpreted that event in the following way: "Russia is not part of global civilization. We are a civilization unto ourselves. Huntington was absolutely right. Russia is a large isolated island. We had no other way to prove Huntington right than to attack Ukraine."[2]

2. Post-imperial Identity Wars

American political scientist Samuel Huntington, whom Dugin refers to, predicted that after the Cold War, the structure of the political world would be marked by cultural, religious, and civilizational divisions that would generate most future conflicts. Identity wars – a kind of revival of medieval religious and crusader wars – will, according to him, define the 21st century. Francis Fukuyama, his great competitor in interpreting the global turning point of 1989, will admit in his book Identity (published in 2018, and clearly written under the impression of Trump's victory in the 2016 elections) that the identity factor, which he sees in opposition to the liberal paradigm, plays a key role in political dynamics, not only in international relations but also within individual Western communities, e.g., in the struggle for minority rights.[3] Moreover, identity conflicts arise due to an energy imbalance in the perception of one's own dignity: "In reality, we need a theory that explains why some people strive for money or security, while others are willing to die for their cause."[4] Fukuyama attempts to outline this theory with the ancient Greek term thymos, "Thymos is that part of the soul which strives for the recognition of its dignity." In identity conflicts, two variants of thymos manifest: isothymia as the effort to establish one's own equality with others, and megalothymia as the urge for others to recognize us as superior. Viewed from this angle, one might initially say that Russia and Israel, in their policies towards Ukraine and the Palestinians, follow the impulse of megalothymia, a sense of superiority over other communities, which from a megalothymic perspective become inferior entities, to whom they either deny a distinct identity (in the case of Ukrainians) or deny them the right to statehood (in both cases, Ukrainians and Palestinians). However, the transitions between the struggle for equality and the struggle for dominance are often fluid and accompanied by dehumanizing discourse. The denial of the right to exist of the Jewish state or calls for the elimination of "contaminated" Russian culture from global cultural memory indicate that in adhering to the logic of a ruthless identity war, all moral boundaries are often erased.

3. Fatal Decontextualization

In any case, the liberal order has not had a convincing answer to the great identity wars. Decades of appeasement towards Russia (and China) prepared the ground for Russia's aggression against Ukraine, and the strategic alliance with some Middle Eastern dictatorships and autocracies, as well as the right-wing regime in Israel, at the expense of a just resolution of the Palestinian issue and democratization of this region, is showing its devastating effects. The neglect of the identity factor and the disregard for the value dimension in politics, all in the name of unrestrained globalized capitalism, which Nancy Fraser says, like an ouroboros, bites its own tail[5], cannibalistically devouring the substance on which it rests, leaves devastation behind. Let it be clear: this criticism of the West does not mean assigning blame unilaterally; on the contrary, direct responsibility for the current crisis lies with: the pseudo-imperial Kremlin regime in the case of the Russian-Ukrainian war, the cynical terror of Hamas, the decades-long chauvinistic policy of the state of Israel towards the Palestinians, the hypocritical policy of Arab countries in the Middle Eastern conflict.

However, the geopolitical West, which likes to boast of its civilizational achievements, is a major accomplice in the current state of the world, as it also participates in post-imperial identity wars in an unprincipled manner. A fundamental sin, especially concerning the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, lies in the lack of awareness of how the West, with imperial-colonial eyes, perceives this most explosive region of the world. The basis of this view, however paradoxical it may sound, is the experience of the Holocaust, the greatest genocide in human history, committed by Europeans, i.e., the Third Reich and its not so few allies. Europe's bad conscience created a new paradigm in its collective identity; Aleida Assmann states somewhere that Auschwitz is the founding narrative of post-war West Germany. This is all understandable, but the problem begins when one's own memory is projected onto other world regions that do not share this experience, completely ignoring their specific context, as Indian intellectual Pankaj Mishra pointed out in an essay for the German Spiegel, emphasizing that the West has not yet understood that for Asia, Africa, or the Arab world, the founding narrative is "not World War II but decolonization."[6]

This is precisely what Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek tried to explain in his speech at the opening of the Frankfurt Book Fair, at times perhaps unnecessarily spiced with rather controversial comparisons, after which a flood of criticism followed in the German press. Žižek, who has condemned Hamas's brutal terrorism several times, tried to point to the context, which is the multi-generational agony of the Palestinians due to Israeli policy, in which such radicalization was even possible. This was enough to even accuse him of antisemitism and relativizing crimes. However, relativization as a discursive mechanism, as pointed out by German philosopher Daniel-Pascal Zorn at the time, aims to justify events (in this case, crimes) and represents the exact opposite of contextualization, which seeks to "understand the complexity" of events. Some European intellectuals, such as Peter Handke, who relativized war crimes in the former Yugoslavia and Slobodan Milošević's policy, by mechanically comparing the crimes of the "warring parties" and equating them, have distinguished themselves by extreme decontextualization.

It is precisely this tendency towards extreme decontextualization that characterizes the shaping of public opinion in the latest escalation of the Israeli-Palestinian war: while, for example, pro-Palestinian media (mostly in the East) largely omit or downplay Hamas's brutal killing of civilians, as the immediate cause of the conflict's flare-up, presenting Palestinians exclusively as victims, pro-Israeli actors (mostly in the West) downplay the significance of decades of repression against Palestinians, which has the hallmarks of apartheid, uncritically welcoming the mass killing of civilians in Gaza, and reacting hysterically to anyone (including Žižek) who tries to offer a differentiated picture of the current events.

Identity wars force a simplification of reality, reducing it to a dichotomy of eternal conflict with an inherent logic of us or them. If the famous, often mentioned, "historical experience" teaches us anything, it is the insight that in such a conflict there will be no winners.

[1] Cf. https://www.slobodna-bosna.ba/vijest/321089/zloslutne_prognoze_putinovog_ideologa_krece_haos_sirom_evrope_i_amerike.html

[2] See: Vahidin Preljević: Drugačiji svijet. Rat u Ukrajini i putinizam. Tacno.net, 14.03.2022. https://www.tacno.net/novosti/drugaciji-svijet-rat-u-ukrajini-i-putinizam/

[3] We have already written about this recently at this place. See: https://www.tacno.net/deblokada-uma/zatvaranje-balkanskog-subjekta-crtice-o-politici-identiteta/

[4] Francis Fukuyama: Identity. The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2018, here used German edition: Identität. Wie der Verlust der Würde unsere Demokratie gefährdet. Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe 2019.

[5] Nancy Fraser: Cannibal Capitalism. Verso Book 2022.

[6] Pankaj Mishra: Der nahe Osten, vom Süden aus betrachtet. In: Der Spiegel 14.10.2023.