Egotist, fool or threat? Another reply to Adam Shatz
On speaking for others
Let me begin by saying what this is not. It is not a criticism or an opposition to non-Palestinians writing about Palestine. Being Palestinan is a bar that I obviously don't clear myself, though I have written a lot on the subject and probably won't stop soon.
Given, too, the concerted effort of Zionism to convert non-Jewish people into philosemites willing to advocate passionately on behalf of Zionism, to walk them through a process of voodoo that produces pseudo-defenders of Jewish safety, I also think it would be profoundly unhelpful for non-Palestinians to stop writing and advocating on behalf of Palestine. Even without this, given generational efforts by Zionists to make advocating on behalf of the Israeli project in Palestine a received wisdom, again, I think it would be profoundly unhelpful for non-Palestinians to stop advocating by whatever means they have on behalf of Palestine. As the expression goes, “you don't have to be Muslim to care about Palestine, just human”, and given that a third of Palestinians are practising Christians or basically secular anyway, although the basic principle holds, even this starting-point doesn't fully convey how obvious it would be that absolutely anyone would and probably should care and advocate for the urgent cause of justice in Palestine.
So when I criticise the writing of US academic, Adam Shatz, in the London Review of Books, it is not because he is not Palestinian.
Nor is it because I feel betrayed by his writing, because such would imply that I ever to begin with felt impressed or represented in, or a sense of loyalty to, the writing of Adam Shatz. I would reason that the show of loyalty by others, the willingness not only to appreciate, but to fend-off those who do not appreciate, Adam Shatz, is a phenomenon as or more deserving of scrutiny than those who feel unrepresented or angry in Shatz's latest multi-thousand-word outline of his view of the situation in Palestine.
The below is not an exhaustive list of why Shatz has consistently shown himself to be a flawed scholar in addressing the situation in Palestine, nor is it even a claim that he is the worst on these grounds. In some ways I criticise him because he has in the past been marginally less aggravating than some, and in a better world these criticisms, which I believe fair and maybe even constructive, would improve the quality of his study and of others like him; people who overtly identify as supporting the cause of Palestine but quite clearly compromise it in ways they perhaps don't even themselves perceive.
For the record, I feel that reading each and every one of Shatz's 8000-word offerings on Palestine, before expressing an opinion, is about as essential or advisable as returning to a restaurant you don't like each time the menu changes, simply to find out if it's still bad. That being said, and having read (too?) many of these offerings, I present the below.
Palestinianism
Three essays provide cornerstones of how to understand Shatz as a scholar writing on Palestine. In an LRB essay in 2021, documenting the work of renowned Palestinian scholar, Edward Said, Shatz wrote of Said's idea of “Palestinianism"; a cosmopolitan identity behind which the world could unite and rally. So far so uncomplicated. The nature of an LRB essay (where Shatz in this instance reviews Brennan reviewing Said) makes attribution difficult, but as Shatz proves very capable of interjecting with his own views where they arise, it is noticeable when he does not feel the need to editorialise in such a way, and he is quite apart from that of course expected to hold some basic self-awareness. It should go without saying (though maybe Shatz needs it said) that Said as a Palestinian exile and intellectual, grappling with his complex relationships to wider Palestinian society, ideas and customs, is not the same as a US-Jewish academic doing so and when none of the same tensions apply.
In Palestinianism, Shatz writes of sumud - the Palestinian concept of steadfastness - but while praising cultural initiatives such as the Divan Orchestra in which Palestinian and Israeli musicians play together, Shatz's review manages - albeit via Said - to stridently belittle those Palestinians and Arabs who refuse the normalisation of their oppression under a relationship with Israeli Zionism. Worse, Shatz manages to talk-down to practices or values inherent to sumud, making off-hand comments about reverence for Al Aqsa Mosque or, more damning, the custom of keeping the keys to houses from which Palestinians were expelled by Israeli settlers. The following section in particular makes one whince in its disdain for everyday and non-intellectual Palestinian touchstones, and - again - though Shatz is channeling Said, he seems to do so favourably, and without the alibi of Said's personal and inherently more complex relationship to Palestine:
“He had no interest in the folk nationalism of the refugee camps, with its romance of repatriation and reclamation: the keys to old homes, women’s embroidery, the olive tree, the posters of Al-Aqsa mosque. Instead, he wrote of Palestinians as witnesses to a century defined by ethnic cleansing, wars of national liberation, and migration, in restless, nomadic pursuit of freedom: ‘a counterpoint (if not a cacophony) of multiple, almost desperate dramas’.
Said’s Palestinianism exemplified the qualities he admired: open-ended and exploratory, resistant to the doctrinal and racial fixity – the dark historical fatalism and exclusionary fear of the other – that Zionism embodied.”
Even at the time in 2021, it seemed to me an unusual, frustrating essay to have written by a non-Palestinian. With its disdain for the humdrum, traditional, popular symbols of Palestinian resistance, the preference for high culture and intellectual history, in it are the seeds of an insensitivity, order of priority, and either self-regard or intellectual arrogance that has been at the heart of criticism of Shatz since last October.
“Vengeful Pathologies"
The beginnings of that hostility to Shatz's narration of (or over the top of) Palestinian resistance came with his first response to Al Aqsa Flood, written weeks after it, in early November 2023. With emotions still high, information patchy, and most of the world as yet unaware quite how murderous the Israelis were and are, Shatz caused ire with the very title “vengeful pathologies”, trivialising Palestinian resistance into an emotional condition or even a mental sickness. Much as a woman who finally hits back at her abusive husband is not exactly hysterical, Palestinian resistance described in such terms seemed unhelpful to the cause of Palestinian liberation that Shatz has long championed - at least notionally.
The essay’s content jarred every bit as much as its title, which for all its failings was not unrepresentative of what Shatz went on to write. Shatz repeats the shape of Israeli lies about a Hamas “killing spree" that killed “women, children and babies”. Only one baby died in the fighting (per Haaretz), with every indication it was an accidental casualty of widespread fighting. The overt lie (not reproduced by Shatz) of “40 beheaded babies", which generated the first western consent in this awful genocide, is no longer reproduced by even the worst Israeli liars. Shatz repeated Israeli casualty counts suggesting “over a thousand civilians" were killed by Qassam forces, a number the Israelis since revised-downwards, and which failed to distinguish Israeli military from civilian casualties.
For Shatz to have rooted his critique in this tone, despite the known and extensive history of Israeli propaganda, while failing to mention available information about things like the “Hannibal Directive” by which the Israeli military themselves killed many Israelis rather than have them taken prisoner, is at best a negligence. It is also worthy of note that Shatz, as a white man of Jewish heritage, is not a potential victim of the Islamophobia that such propaganda turbocharges in the western society where he is read. In return for Shatz and others appeasing a Zionist or Zionist-sympathetic audience by parroting Israeli propaganda, millions of Muslim or Arab or Muslim-perceived individuals end up thrown further under the racist bus. That Shatz for good measure mentioned The Bataclan attack by ISIS in Paris, again following the shape of concerted Israeli propaganda efforts, rather than recognising the very specific and focused role of Hamas as a Palestinian resistance group (who swiftly destroyed the first ISIS cells in Gaza while the Israelis continued to help them in Syria) - was a further error both scholarly and moral, particularly when thousands of Palestinians had by the time of his November offering already been killed by the Israelis. It is legitimate for people to adjudge all of this unforgivable, and to be angry both at Shatz and the idea they should bow to his subsequent words.
Tone aside, however, one section of the essay did strike me as more usefully encapsulating Shatz the writer. Shatz remarks that Pearl Harbour, the 1973 Arab-Israeli War and other surprise attacks, are imperfect comparators for what happened on October 7 during the Al Aqsa Flood operation, rather:
“the most suggestive analogy is a pivotal, and largely forgotten, episode in the Algerian War of Independence: the Philippeville uprising of August 1955. Encircled by the French army, fearful of losing ground to reformist Muslim politicians who favoured a negotiated settlement, the FLN launched a gruesome attack in and around the harbour town of Philippeville.”
Shatz's argument is that Algerian revolutionaries were destroying the space for moderate compromise (something Hamas and civil society groups in Gaza have long attempted to find with the Israelis, only to discover that the potential for compromise is something that actually never existed in Zionism). More than the accuracy or otherwise in the comparison, however, is Shatz reaching for a semi-obscure 1955 event from Algeria as the definitive analogue to Al Aqsa Flood, while his mid-road peers went for the more obvious and blockbuster comparisons of surprise attacks at Pearl Harbour or the onset of the Yom Kippur War. In this we see the common failure both of public intellectuals and pop history (the idea that there must always be a perfect fit in history, rather than history as a constantly unfolding process full of unique events), but also Shatz's personality as an enthusiast of revolutionary and colonial struggles. Shatz the history enthusiast produces a superior and less-known analogy for how to understand the global revolutionary struggle in which - despite being a successful academic and white man living in New York - he to some degree seems to see himself as participant. His fascination with Franz Fanon, who many black and decolonising writers claim he has appropriated and distorted the meaning of into tamer forms, is of course further case in point.
“Israel's Descent”
In his most recent venture, “Israel's Descent” (a title which dubiously proposes that the Israeli project has ever taken a morally superior form to the one we see now), Shatz suggests among other things that safety from the horrors of Nazi Europe cannot mean the horrors of Gaza.
"Israel’s supporters might argue that this is not the Shoah, but the belief that the best way of honouring the memory of those who died in Auschwitz is to condone the mass killing of Palestinians so that Israeli Jews can feel safe again is one of the great moral perversions of our time."
Fair enough, but it should not take an intellectual to make this self-evident point. Moreover, the fact that Shatz makes it at all is indeed an intellectual error, a falling into a trap, that again shows if not his Zionism then the fact that this is the emotional-intellectual milieu in which Shatz operates, or that Zionists are the people he seeks to persuade.
The Israelis are indeed carrying out a holocaust against Palestinians in Gaza, but this holocaust bears no connecting thread between itself and events in Europe in the 1940s. To do so on Shatz's terms is to frame Palestinians as the threat when they are the oppressed, but it also humanises in ways fundamentally illegitimate the Israeli genocidal bent and preexisting Israeli nature, couching both in the relatable term of a desire for safety, or - as Zionist apologists famously like to claim - a product of trauma.
When the Israelis in the first months of the war signed over marine gas licenses, allowing BP to explore in Palestinian waters off Gaza, was this raw and material pursuit of self-interest also a product of trauma? Was murdering humanitarians from World Central Kitchen trauma? Was concerted lying about the Al-Ahli Hospital bombing trauma? Was it trauma to set up exclusive screenings of a purpose-made atrocity propaganda film for influencers in cinemas in London and New York? Was it trauma to have Quentin Tarantino fly-in and pose for photos with Israeli soldiers on their way to genocide, to have US politicians write messages of destruction on bombs destined to kill Palestinian children? For trauma it all seems remarkably well organised and attuned to media and far-right popular culture. It is not possible to imagine another entity acting in such nakedly vicious and self-seeking ways and yet being actively humanised for their troubles.
Arguably most enraging was Shatz reminding his readers that over a century ago there existed the tussle between Cultural and Political Zionism; a debate where the cultural Zionism of a state for all - still a colony but built on Jewish values - eventually lost out decisively to the political Zionism of the Israeli ethnostate, a place intended for Jewish people and with no space for Palestinians despite it being in Palestine.
For Shatz to go reminding or revising in search of a redeemable face of Zionism, at the very moment when Zionism is bombing refugee tents and showing itself at its most evidently irredeemable, is at worst an apologia and a deliberate distraction, and at best a total delusion concerning the thing he is describing. The desire to invoke a better Zionism precisely when Zionism shows itself at what is - even by its own high standards - its most evil, is a sort of deep and irrational attachment that one would ordinarily and forgivably only associate with a Zionist. Perhaps, for Shatz, and like all true believers, Zionism just hasn't yet been tried properly.
Again, for someone who is not without knowledge of Zionist propaganda and method, to invoke this spectre at all is either the attitude of a Zionist, of one who has been taken-in by Zionist talking points, or who feels so duty-bound to them that he will continue talking to Zionists as reasonable actors despite evidence to the contrary, and despite their clear disinterest in what he has to say of moderation or legitimate grounds for Palestinian resistance.
Shatz, however, does not stop there. As well as the above, Shatz the New York academic also decries the incompetence of actual Palestinian leadership. In his latest treatise, Shatz accuses Hamas political leader Yahya Sinwar, and military leader Mohammed Deif, of ‐ among other things - lacking “strategic vision". Quite apart from the amusingly Blairite, third-way, disgruntled CEO nature of this criticism, it is a charge it must take great confidence to make against two men both repeatedly bereaved by the Israelis and organising Palestinian resistance under 17-year siege conditions. Sinwar was a child refugee to Gaza, from nearby Asqalan, after Zionist forces tore through his home city. He has spent 20 years of his life in Israeli jails and learned Hebrew during that time, as well as applying himself to the study of Israeli society and its many freakish oddities, all in the service of a free Palestine. Deif had his wife and children murdered by the Israelis in 2014 attacks. Adam Shatz seems to think this worth not only no respect but also no pause for thought on whether Adam Shatz of New York is in a position to pass judgment on those of such life experience.
This indifference or disdain is further strange given that Shatz is ordinarily so enchanted by revolutionary struggle and its protagonists. Why do the compelling histories and against-all-odds endeavours of Palestinian guerrillas fail to budge his instinct to explain the oppression of Zionism, or to criticise the resistance of Palestinians?
It is hard not to see this high-hanedness within the context of a wider societal willingness to promote Jewish opinion on Palestine, to the point at which Shatz epitomises some sense that his voice should be leading rather than collaborative or even - heaven forbid - in a supporting role to Palestinians. Because they are more (but not entirely) proofed against the regular Zionist howl of “Anti-Semitism", Jewish voices have a leg-up in western advocacy for Palestine, but with attendant risks that those voices come to think themselves entitled to that platform, that it confers upon them Palestinian leadership credentials, and failing to notice that their suitability is driven primarily by a suitability to rebut the Zionist fondness for defamation, rather than out of any greater stake in Palestine or qualification to speak for Palestine. Although great merit can and often does exist in these advocates, to instinctively interpret as merit what is often suitability for a role is in itself a category error.
The Problem Of Centring Jewish Support
Shatz's analysis and high-handed dismissal of both Palestinians and Palestinian sacrifice speaks then to the associated problem in which Jewish people, who say simply that a vicious, genocidal project in Palestine does not represent them or their religion, are often treated to rapturous applause. Further distorting is that they are considerably more likely than an Arab or Muslim to be elevated when clearing this absurdly low moral bar of not supporting genocide and settler colonialism, or wanting it carried out in your name.
It is not surprising that consistently ready promotion can in certain individuals induce an exceedingly high regard of one's own views. There is an important counterpoint here, however, in that Jewish-Canadian writer, Naomi Klein, who was also criticised strongly for her instinctive written responses to Al Aqsa Flood, demonstrated the humility to then consult with Palestinians, express that she had done so, and apologise and withdraw many of her initial comments. Shatz seems to have no such qualms with anything he's written in recent months.
Beyond any personal handling of the privilege conferred on western Jewish commentators, it is perhaps also helpful to consider structural and psychological reasons why western media and power systems so prefer their narration of Israeli atrocity in Palestine.
Firstly and the Jewish person expressing distance or distaste for the Israeli endeavour is an easier emotion for western society and particularly media to handle and broadcast. Their feeling of guilt, shame or rejection, partial or otherwise, is still more tame than the angry, wronged member of a minority group that must watch their own culture, reputation and kin abused in Palestine (using their taxes, and against the popular will); individuals that western society is sadly still taught on a societal level to mistrust and on a state level to police. Particularly where they take the pedestrian form of Shatz's, Jewish misgivings that the Israelis are going too far are a less volatile substance to take into the public debate. Given that white and social privilege already works to the advantage of figures like Shatz, it is very easy for them to become overrepresented in the generation of debate about Palestine. This is particularly harmful where western military force is already activated and works by default for the Israelis, so that dissent rather than cordial disappointment is an essential quality to force a change from this horrific course of events and western complicity in it.
The effects of this centring are however of course different in different people. A growing number of Jewish people, particularly younger Jewish people, reject it entirely; they are likely to see it within a discourse of white privilege far more advanced than it was during Shatz's formative years. Others struggle visibly with the odd burden of expressing the rightness of a revolutionary struggle that isn't theirs, and a misuse of their faith they abhor instinctively anyway. Shatz fits into another camp and - matched with his own worship of revolutionary or dissenting figures such as Fanon or Adolfo Kaminsky - seems to have mistaken himself not only for a revolutionary, but for one who is equipped - despite being a privileged, white, Jewish academic living in New York - to dictate to actual Palestinian resistance leaders how best to resist. These are men who all their lives have known death, murder and displacement at the cruel hands of the Israelis; they are men who currently live underground, directing a resistance operation against the combined and multibillion dollar force of the US, UK and Israeli militaries. While Zionist barbarism against Palestinian civilians makes it impossible to call anything a “success", it is clear in terms of Israeli casualties, duration of conflict, failure to achieve objectives, social fracture, and cost to the Israeli economy, that their war against Palestinian resistance in Gaza has - once again and as with past invasions of Lebanon - been a failure. Despite this, we are asked to believe it is a New York public intellectual and history enthusiast who apparently knows best.
Words Over Actions
To be fair and Shatz, whatever the particular traits of his intellectual character, is far from alone in perpetrating this wider problem.
Another prominent example (though someone generally held in considerably higher regard) is Norman Finkelstein. The son of Jewish parents who escaped the Holocaust, Finkelstein is - unlike Shatz - an unflinching critic of both the Israelis and their methods, lies, and the emotional manipulation of the horror his family fled.
For all this, and in yet another illustration that Israelis care nothing for Jewish protection or Holocaust survivors, Finkelstein had his academic career destroyed by the Israeli lobby in the US. This attack was earned particularly for his work on what Finkelstein called The Holocaust Industry; a study of the use of European crimes against its Jewish population in the 1940s as a means of propagandising and lubricating the US war machine for Zionism. While all this is irrefutable and speaks to the considerable contribution of Finkelstein to public understanding, a notable blemish against that contribution has been Finkelstein's tendency to attack Palestinian theorists who he should arguably see as partners in the movement against Zionism. Paramount in this regard was Finkelstein's baffling criticism of Palestinian-American academic, Steven Salaita, who also had his academic career destroyed by the Israeli lobby. Finkelstein, in an incredible act of gracelessness, remarked (erroneously) that Salaita's work had left “no discernible record" and (erroneously but also insultingly) that it was “barely intelligible”.
It is probably fair to say that Finkelstein harbours bitterness at the world for the decades he spent with his potential being wasted in an academic wilderness; but this is the fault of the Zionist lobby and not Steven Salaita, who actually for many years shared that exact same fate. Whatever the undoubted family tragedy of the Finkelsteins and Norman's career (recently resurrected), and the moral uprightness that he should catalyse it into strident advocacy for Palestinians, there is in these remarks, and similar to Shatz, the hallmark of the scholar for whom the struggle is not as mortal or personal as it is in Palestine or for Palestinians. This is a detachment that in turn leaves the detached prone to the petty feuds, vanities and rivalries of scholarship. Finkelstein has similarly earned the criticism of Palestinian groups for criticising their boycott campaign, modelled on that one that successfully ended South African apartheid; again, when your currency is words and you already have your liberty, to belittle the actions of others becomes easy.
There is a further unobserved advantage that the anti-Zionist voice - Jewish or otherwise - enjoys in the marketplace of western attention, and quite apart from any privilege afforded by either Jewishness or whiteness. Their vital work (which is naturally sympathetic to, but crucially not the same as that of Palestinian liberation) involves deconstruction of the lies, cynicism, manipulation and censorship that upholds Zionism. While the west also has an even more thriving marketplace for a fake product of Free Speech that purports to take apart mainstream lies while doing no such thing, the real deal - epitomised by Finkelstein and to a much lesser extent Shatz - still holds enough appeal that there is demand for this sophisticated, articulate and intelligent unpicking of lies and double standards, the sort of thing that good, useful intellectualism is intended to perform.
The problem in this respect for the actual and physical cause of Palestinian liberation, as opposed to the intellectual cause of Zionist deconstruction, is that for all its truth, honesty, righteousness and urgency, the necessity of Palestinian liberation is not an intellectually sophisticated product, nor does it need to be. Palestinian liberation literally needs only the two words “Free Palestine”, repeated often and courageously enough and in the right places, or perhaps conviction to say “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be Free" when the usual frauds profess that there is something “problematic” in these words (one of Shatz's greatest intellectual crimes is to endorse this tabloid smear).
All this leaves Shatz's recent essay some 6962 short of his word count, and indeed leaves the actual cause of Palestinian liberation as a less appealing subject to the purveyors of intellectual cultural products. If you only need two of them, what happens to the rest of the words that Shatz wants to write and subscribers pay to read?
Underpinning all of this is the addiction of the so-called liberal not just to being heard but simply to speaking, even if speaking to oneself, or speaking to those currently committing and heartily endorsing genocide. Addicted to one's own eloquence and the mere sorting of words, one more performance for the audience is preferable to the horror of having nothing to say, and it is this order of merit that sees Shatz able to assume such jaw-dropping disdain for the likes of Sinwar and Deif, who have been compelled by the horror of the decades into action. Theirs is a world the likes of Shatz cannot countenance, for it sits outside the shelter of the words and applause they so constantly assemble. It shouldn’t need to be said that Zionists in Palestine are and always have been entirely happy with such an arrangement because, for all their obscene faults, Zionist settlers do believe in actions over words, and they are only too happy to act simultaneously to - and behind the cloak of - the sympathetic talking of others.
It would again be unfair to suggest that all of these problems are limited only to Shatz. Another recent LRB superstar essay by Pankaj Mishra, “The Shoah After Gaza”, also chronicled the abuses of Zionism. Mishra plotted his route via Primo Levi and Zygmunt Bauman, as well as the dismal US stenographer Ezra Klein and known heroes such as Baldwin, W.E.B. Du Bois, Aimé Césaire … but no Palestinians (with the exception of Mishra's almost awkward admission that he read Edward Said as a young man).
At some point this omission, whatever else is written or the value of it, becomes the point. Because whatever the high gymnastics of intellectualism going on, the underlying and implicit message of both the commissioning and the reading list is that *you don't even ever have to listen to Palestinians*.
This problem - which also feeds into a criminal disbelief when Palestinians report the horrors Israelis visit upon them ‐ is compounded by the leg-up that Palestine-sympathetic Jewish writers have in getting to narrate the struggle, despite perhaps having residual or even quite high levels of social and cultural immersion in Zionism. If Flaubert said of writing that the author must be “felt everywhere and seen nowhere”, what this model of narration achieves for Palestine is a polar opposite where Palestinians are seen everywhere and felt nowhere. This omission is all the more criminal in light of the obvious abundance of bilingual (not that this should be the only qualification) Palestinian writers and thinkers with direct firsthand experience of the evils of Zionism, and with all the far more crucial lessons of thought and action such awful experience prompts.
What happens without the inclusion of their voices is that Palestinians become a subject in the western discourse of liberation, when in fact they are its foremost agent and actors; Palestine becomes only a Kanafani poster on the walls of western scholars, a prop to their careers and conversations, a background to their dinner parties.
Zionism as attack on western citizens
There is, however, a further important constituency within the struggle for Palestine that Shatz et al are also talking over the top of. Given the tight support on the one hand between the Israelis and the international far-right, and on the other the evidently, proudly and beautifully multiracial and multifaith protests for Palestine across the western world, it is no coincidence that the foremost method of Israeli manoeuvre is to cosy-up to the white nationalists who seek to erode the democratic and citizen rights of non-white people and groups in the west. This can take the shape of attacks on writers, or deligitmising protest movements, individuals, or elected politicians that are supportive of Palestine. Implicit to the task is to erode the rights of citizens to protest, to a stake in their foreign policy, and quite possibly to their personal liberty. As Benjamin Netanyahu once perfectly described the aspiration, upon passing the Israeli nation-state law, the goal is to create a state model that is not “of all of its citizens”.
Because racism is incredibly easy to perceive when you are or have ever been the victim of it, worldwide supporters of justice in Palestine know full well that Zionism is gunning for them. Zionism is an attack on Palestinians in Palestine but also on the rights of those who advocate for Palestine and their own rights outside of it. Nor - unlike Shatz's pondering of Zionisms that might have been - is this threat an abstract thought. A British Muslim woman loses her job for the “hate speech" of holding a playful sign depicting the fervently right-wing Tory servants of white power - Sunak, Patel, Braverman - as coconuts. A Palestinian woman attends a protest with a parachute sticker on her back (a nod to how some Qassam units escaped Gaza in gliders) and has her refugee status reviewed by the institutionally racist UK Home Office.
This, too, is why the model of the white Jewish saviour such as Shatz is heavily problematic, because it leaves him not only to advocate on behalf of Palestinians but also on behalf and over the top of fellow North American and European citizens of generally less privilege than he, and far more endangered by the attack that the Israeli lobby is already executing and means to redouble.
This is the danger of the saviour cult attached to such figures; it leaves millions reliant on being noticed by them, on having someone else benevolently advocating for them, rather than giving them the platform from which to argue their own fury, a thing by now so richly warranted. As a further problem, this very dynamic, one in which Zionist or anti-Zionist Jewish people joust - with lances of either Palestinian humanity on the one hand or Zionist racism on the other - competing for the soul of western consciousness as they go, implicitly centres and divides-up the Jewish community in ways that - as a historian Shatz should be only too aware - history warns ill-advised. An Arab Muslim writing of his (I say his only because men are the most viciously demonised by Zionism, and so the most decidedly in need of that platform) fury in the LRB may not only be the most necessary thing right now, it may also be that which - in the long-run - helpfully de-centres Jewish voices from a debate that affects many western communities far more directly and violently than it anyway does them.
What makes a Zionist?
In the furore around his latest offering, much of the defence of Shatz was an opposition to Shatz or his writing being labelled as Zionist. At root, however, and whatever its evocative connotations, the word “Zionist” is simply a word with a technical meaning. Anyone who doesn't believe in the dissolution of the Israeli venture in Palestine would always be hard-pressed not to to show-up at some point on the Zionist spectrum.
Whether or not Shatz himself is or identifies as a Zionist is of secondary importance to what his writing conveys and who it is aimed at. If writing addresses Zionist talking points and seeks to persuade Zionists while frequently delegitimising Palestinians, it is immaterial if the writer sees themselves as a Zionist because they are serving a Zionist function. Even Shatz's rhetorical question “how many Palestinian children must die before Israelis feel safe?” - admits so openly it is subtle that the envisaged recipient and reader of this question is quite clearly not Palestinian, and quite probably a Zionist or Zionist‐sympathiser.
Palestinians in Palestine meanwhile are having their lives wiped out “like we are chickens" (as the Palestinian ambassador to Peru, Walid Muaqqat, told me in Lima in early October last year, just before Al Aqsa Flood, and at that point referencing only West Bank killings by the Israelis). Those in support of Palestine, particularly in the US, Germany and UK, are being arrested or threatened with deportation under counter-terror legislation. They are having their jobs and livelihoods attacked and (unlike Shatz) are risking rather than advancing their careers by saying what they believe. If Shatz takes-up the persuasion of Zionists as his priority at such a time, then that is for him to decide, but nobody should expect him to be thanked for it. More crucial still, given the threats poured down on Palestinians and their supporters, the movement requires a galvanised spirit and solidarity from which these apparent priorities set Shatz apart, and which - if such priorities were placed close to its heart - would have a clearly detrimental, fracturing and weakening effect.
Ways forward
Palestinian hero and thinker Bassem Tamimi, prior to his arrest and torture by the Israelis since October, told visiting authors gathered at his West Bank village of Nabi Saleh that Jewish people need to reclaim their religion from Zionism. This could not be more simple and more true, but it is also good advice for Shatz, for what Shatz is doing is endeavouring instead to reclaim Palestinian resistance from Palestinians. A more honest reflection of who he is, and arguably a better role for himself, would be to prise Judaism back from billionaire Jewish-Zionists like Blavatnik or Adelson, non-Jewish Zionists like Rupert Murdoch or Joe Biden, or simply reflect on why the so-called liberal Zionism he seems to believe in has never manifested.
At root is the issue that a Zionist is not in every case - though such creatures may be their fellow-travellers - a monster executing a man in a hospital bed, bombing children playing on a beach, shooting a child in his father's arms. A Zionist can simply be one who continues looking to the Israeli project for rational or human answers when they have proven themselves irrational and inhuman, who looks to it for solutions when the only solution they want is final and unconsicionable, who ‐ again - sees and even defends the idea of Zionism as redeemable even at the moment it shows itself most irredeemable.
At their deepest psychological core, a Zionist is probably someone who can only imagine the discourse about what to do in Palestine as one that takes place with the Israeli project, or mediated through other Zionists, because they have yet to shake off that milieu and so fail to sincerely envision the free Palestine that successful resistance requires us to be able to see. Sometimes, for reasons of their own, the liberal Zionist may even offer a supporting voice, Shatz may even at times be one such voice, but they cannot be the speartip, and the mistaken belief that they are will leave it blunted. There is also ample room to argue that Shatz's to an extent well-meaning words are by very virtue of their good intention far more dangerous and penetrative than a Zionism that simply advocates murder or engages more sinister historical revisionisms.
Even to commit so many words to this at this time feels in bad taste, I only do it to envisage a way forward. Some fifty thousand Palestinians have been murdered by the Israelis, children now are having heart attacks in this avoidable and man-made apocalypse, more bombs have been dropped on Gaza than were dropped on all Europe in all the Second World War. It must stop, and Zionism in all its forms must be defeated, for it cannot be reasoned with, appeased, or justified.
Today I read a Palestinian youth tweeting from Gaza that she is tired of the colour grey, and that moving in the rubble of her city is now more climbing than walking. I want to know what she has to say, not Adam Shatz. I want people to read her writing and the core truth in all this: that Palestine must be free, that it is for Palestinians to decide how best to proceed, that we must listen to Palestinians.
Further reading :
Kerry Sinanan; meticulous on the linguistic paper trail of Shatz's Zionism.
https://massreview.org/node/11983
Abdaljawad Omar in earlier response to Shatz; a supreme intellectual foundation for the justness of Palestinian armed resistance.
https://mondoweiss.net/2023/11/hopeful-pathologies-in-the-war-for-palestine-a-reply-to-adam-shatz/