For analysis, not wordplay!

We are right to criticise “slippery slogans” around Israel/Palestine as elsewhere. Se must push back against another problem too: a sole and superficial focus on individual words, on their emotional and rhetoric force over substance, and using these for virtue-signalling or “gotcha!” politics.

One recent protest chant is “Not a war! Not a conflict!”

The assertion is false. “Conflict” and “war” do not imply symmetry in military might or indeed culpability. The might of the Israeli military far outweighs that of Hamas, though Hamas and Hezbollah are armed to the teeth by Iran, a dictatorship sworn to Israel’s destruction. Hamas used these weapons in their 7 October massacre, and continues to fight. The war of an Israeli government led by Netanyahu and the far right against the clerical-fascist Hamas has massacred thousands upon thousands of Palestinian civilians, many children, at best as “collateral”.

At a recent PSC rally, one speaker compared Israel’s actions in Gaza to the Holocaust. That’s false and deeply offensive. Another said that “isn’t a conflict, it’s a… one-sided battle”. Another speaker was the only one to (half-)mention Hamas’s pogrom, but euphemistically as “the escalation of violence on 7 October”. If Israel is the only side, who escalated the violence?

It is “disrespectful to call it a war” (another PSC-demo speaker) not so much, it seems, because consideration of the definition of war and the facts on the ground disproves the claim, but through fear that doing so minimises the moral case against Israel’s slaughter of civilians. Fairytale division of the world into “good” and “bad” peoples precludes facing up to the facts of Hamas’s role.

“Not a war” claims reflect an obsessive quibbling over the emotional implications of particular words, rather than a serious analysis of either the situation or the way forward.

Those protesting the BBC often fixate on the vibes of particular words used in this or that tweet, rather than the substantive coverage or analysis.

On social media and beyond, mandatory hot takes and pontification on the titles of, images with, and individual words in articles displaces reading, reflecting on, and rationally discussing their substance.

We’re left with much chattering about chattering, without analysis or programme to ground it or cut through the dross.

As Sean Matgamna has written:

“In that culture, discussion of permissible and ‘impermissible’ language has a built-in tendency to displace and block off substantive discussion of politics.

“Anyone can play. Anyone who knows not much, or anything, of the substance, can scrutinise the language, and doesn’t have to find out about the substance. People who like to sound off can sound off. The self-righteous nincompoop can be a self-righteous nincompoop.

“This is a characteristic of a would-be left that is too scared of the world around it, and of itself, to think. It is a major trait — both consequence and ongoing cause — in the decadence of the ostensible left.”

In general and most harmfully this culture pushes in a conformist direction, suppressing those who think differently; or express their ideas differently. I’ve been guilty of the latter myself. But encouraging individuals to be scared of their shadows can push in all sorts of directions.

Fear

The letter “Israel, Hamas, and us” ( Solidarity 691) has a feel of such fear. Its “hook” is its condemnation of the previous week’s headline, which could allegedly be read as saying something that it very clearly doesn’t say, and indeed explicitly distances itself from: in both its formulation and in the subtitle. “Neither Netanyahu, nor Hamas, but peace and equal rights: Ceasefire now! Two states! See inside” is not honestly readable as “Destroy Israel!/Destroy Palestine!” nor “Hamas should assassinate Netanyahu!/The IDF should destroy Hamas!” Nor does it imply that our critiques of Netanyahu and Hamas are equivalent and interchangeable.

The front page was clear-cut against the dominant politics of the left we find ourselves in, and crucially directed readers to “see inside”. Any hypothetical person uncertain as to what was meant by it, instead of being caught up in the minutiae of possibilities of more perfect and unadulterable front pages, should be redirected to engage with the substance.

Beyond the bizarre framing, the article has some valuable insights and perspectives. Perhaps they were the real motivation, and the fragile “hook” was contrived to that end. But the latter muddies more than clarifies, and leaves a sense of performative, unconvinced, and concocted self-flagellation; unhelpfully flattening current protests.

I’m not advocating a sloppiness or a softening of precision in words’ meanings. A recognition that words have definite meanings and that slogans should be as clear as possible, goes hand in hand with a recognition that individual words and slogans can only carry so much weight, that we must fight for a culture that goes beyond them.

An oft-repeated declaration about Israel/Palestine on the ostensible left is “it’s not complicated.” This radical sounding statement serves as a celebration of ignorance and a call to arms for lazy and arrogant oversimplification. Some axiomatic principle will cut through the complexity and deliver instant principled answers? But what? It is unstated, or a vague, and fails to deliver.

Israel/Palestine is described as “apartheid”. The evidence? Israel’s racist policies. The evocation? Moral condemnation of an exceptionally evil state. The remedy? Delegitimise and destroy Israel: any Israel, not just current policies. Israel should be forcibly dissolved into a greater Palestine.

Not all states practicing systemic racism are comparable to apartheid South Africa. Nor is the answer to all systemic racism the complete destruction, delegitimisation, dissolution of the state in question. But sloganeering around “apartheid” presents dissent from the orthodoxy of that label as either denying or justifying the (undeniable) racism, rather than dissent from the purported evidence, evocation, remedy.

Or take denunciations of “Zionism”. It is defined simultaneously as the simple recognition of the right to self-determination for Israeli Jews, maybe combined with much criticism of Israeli policies; and as celebrating the policies of far-right Israeli governments or endorsing greater Israel chauvinism and Jewish supremacy. Or as many other meanings between and beyond those. All are conflated to present “smash Zionism” as both an inescapable necessity and as requiring “smashing Israel”.

“Genocide” used interchangeably with “ethnic cleansing” or “massacre”, albeit with more rhetorical power, is unhelpful. As is conflating all proposals, policies, or situations labelled “two state”.

Reality in such a culture is deduced from the rhetorically painted picture, not the other way around. A different protest speaker indicted Israel for bombing Al-Ahli Arab Hospital (the balance of evidence says that particular explosion was not an Israeli bomb), and implied that Hamas’s tunnels under hospitals are an IDF fiction. No evidence was needed for the dubious claims. Emotionally, they can be deduced a priori from the lack of “war” or “conflict”!

No word or slogan is immune to co-option, to being made “slippery”. Daniel Randall’s Solidarity 690 response to Barry Finger’s 689 article covers the important programmatic points. But Barry also raised questions about specific words.

Our call is for a ceasefire in both directions: we oppose Israel’s bombing and blockade of Gaza, and we opposed Hamas’s 7 October massacre and their continued firing of rockets into Israel. A two-sided ceasefire is also what is meant by it by those demanding “ceasefire” in Israel, by many left-wing Palestinians, and others. It is what the SNP motion to UK’s parliament demanded, and many bourgeois commentators. The SWP understand this two-sided meaning of ceasefire, which is why they oppose it.

Ceasefire

Barry understands ceasefire here as one-sided: by Israel but not Hamas. Unfortunately, he is not alone in that. Many within or leading protests feel pressure to call for a ceasefire. Actually they seek the destruction of Israel, so imbue “ceasefire” with an alien meaning.

Ceasefire means temporarily stopping a war. If the Israel-Hamas conflict is “not a war, not a conflict”, if Hamas’s 7 October massacre is an “un-fact”, rarely mentioned and then mostly dismissively or euphemistically, if Hamas’s continued firing of rockets is ignored, then “ceasefire” is a misplaced demand.

But some covertly redefine “ceasefire” to mean a one-sided ceasefire, with Hamas free to continue its “not war” for a greater Palestine to displace all of Israel proper. And respect for the victims in Gaza is supposed to oblige us to look away from that implication.

We should not abandon the demand for a ceasefire, but insist on its true meaning and on genuinely internationalist perspectives which delve beyond the word.

Is Israel’s war on Hamas “collective punishment” of the civilians of Gaza? Well yes, and no, but also yes again. Yes, in the rhetoric of many on the far right in Israel, including within Netanyahu’s government. This rhetoric unofficially influences the details of military decisions by some in the IDF. No, in the sense that the immediate war aims as stated, and to a significant extent in reality, are the destruction of Hamas, an armed far-right organisation which keeps Gazan civilians in a stranglehold and terrorises Israeli civilians. The war goes after Hamas military infrastructure and military personnel. There are warnings, calls for evacuation

But also yes again, in that high “collateral” harm is treated as acceptable towards those aims. The large majority of those killed are civilians, thousands of them children. The blockade impacts civilians most of all.

Hamas carries out its war against Israel with ubiquitous use of human shields. That’s a war crime, but that doesn’t make Israel’s culpability in the thousands massacred less of a war crime. Israel’s war against Hamas, unlike Hamas’s pogrom, is not, as Barry points out, completely “indiscriminate”.

But its collateral starving and slaughtering of civilians, dwarfing the number of Hamas operatives successfully killed, makes it not far off.