The Middle East conflict and the left: Judith Butler describes Hamas massacres as “armed resistance”

Daily Mirror The Middle East conflict and the left: Judith Butler describes Hamas massacres as “armed resistance” by Gerrit Bartels • 5 hours The American philosopher speaks in Paris that the attacks on October 7th were neither terrorist nor anti-Semitic, but simply a - possibly legitimate - attack on Israelis. Shortly after October 7th, the American philosopher and gender theorist Judith Butler, who was born in the USA in 1956 to a Hungarian-Russian-Jewish couple, wrote an essay in the “London Review of Books” about the Hamas massacres and the violence published in the Middle East and attempted to contextualize it, she at least confessed, not without continually talking about violent Israeli “colonial rule”: “In fact, I condemn the violence perpetrated by Hamas without reservation. It was a terrible and disgusting massacre. That was my first reaction and it remains.” She made the restriction this Sunday in Pantin, one of the banlieues of Paris, during a discussion on the video podcast “Paroles d’Honneur”. In a two-minute recording of the rhetoric professor at Berkeley that has been circulating on social media since Monday, you can see and hear her talking about how the Hamas attacks were an “uprising,” “an act of armed resistance.” You have to say that if you want to be “honest and historically accurate,” says Butler. Violence against the Palestinians And further: “It was not a terrorist attack, not an anti-Semitic attack, but one against Israelis.” Here, too, she briefly qualifies that the whole thing was frightening and terrible for her. But she would be “a fool” if she did not take into account the violence perpetrated against Palestinians over decades. Here a violent repressive apparatus, she further argues, there a situation of subjugation, and whether one is “for or against armed resistance,” “for or against Hamas, but let us at least call the thing armed resistance.” Basically, at this event organized by two left-wing Jewish organizations and the indigenous-postcolonial video channel Paroles d'Honneur, Butler only continued her essay shortly after October 7th. I don't have to identify with that face or that name to name the atrocities I see. Judith Butler It was about the ban on contextualization, about the supposedly associated relativization of the Hamas massacres (Butler undertook both of these immediately), about the moral outrage exploited primarily by the media, which falls short and is too superficial. All of this always leads to sentences like these: “We just want to know the history of violence, grief and indignation as lived by Israelis.” Or that atrocities, meaning those of Israelis, were also committed against people, “who are not like me. I don’t have to identify with that face or that name to name the atrocities I see.” It was clear that the timing for such an essay with the strange title “The Compass of Grief” shortly after October 7th did not seem particularly good, since the shock was so deep. Worse are Israel's reductions to a "colonial state", an "apartheid state", which Butler made without any fuss, and its ignorance of Hamas as its own multi-million dollar repressive apparatus in the Gaza Strip, capable of going to war. There is no mention of anti-Semitism, no mention of two hundred hostages, no mention of the goal of many Arab groups and states as well as Iran to wipe out Israel. Legitimate Hamas attack? And now October 7th was not a terrorist attack, not an anti-Semitic attack, but a downright legitimate attack on Israel, on a state repressive apparatus? Is taking hostages also legitimate as an act of resistance? One has to speak of dangerous trivialization, even whitewashing, and not just selective will-o'-the-wisps. You could let Butler do the talking. But given their prominence and their reputation, their statements not only resonate more with the postcolonial left, but are also parroted without context in a cultural industry that is already severely torn apart. “Resistance often hits non-legitimate goals” can be read in an entry on Facebook by cultural scientist, writer and long-time Klagenfurt Bachmann Prize juror Mithu Sanyal. From “armed resistance” to the heroization and even glamorization of Hamas is then only a short way away. At the end of her essay “The Compass of Grief,” Butler wished for a world that resisted the “normalization of colonial rule” and advocated for the “self-determination and freedom of the people.”