WHY TODAY EMPTY GESTURES MATTER MORE THAN EVER

Welcome to the desert of the real.

Zizek Goads and Prods has been up and running for five months. My political writing is free, as is most of my philosophical and jokey pieces. Your subscriptions keep this page going, so if you have the means, and believe in paying for good writing, please do consider becoming a paid subscriber.

On May 20 2024 Salman Rushdie has said that if a Palestinian state were established today, it would be a "Taliban-like state" governed by Hamas. He also criticized the anti-Israel student protests, saying that it was "strange" that the progressive youth would support Hamas, which he called a "fascist terrorist group."[1] I fully understand his bitter stance after what he went through with the fatwa by Khomeini and then the knife attack that almost killed him; I fully sympathize with him when some of his Leftist friends reproached him for “unnecessarily provoking” Muslims. Such reproaches are obviously sustained by the liberal leftist’s fear of being accused of islamophobia. Any critique of Islam is denounced as an expression of Western islamophobia, Salman Rushdie is denounced for unnecessarily provoking Muslims and thus (partially, at least) responsible for the fatwa condemning him to death, etc.etc. The result of such a stance is thus: the more the leftists probe into their guilt, the more they are accused by Muslim fundamentalists of being hypocrites trying to conceal their hatred of Islam. This constellation again perfectly reproduces the paradox of the superego: the more you obey what the Other demands of you, the guiltier you are. It is as if the more you tolerate Islam, the stronger its pressure on you will be…

However, in the case of a Palestinian state, I nonetheless disagree with Rushdie. When he mentions the Taliban, my first association is: but how did the Taliban take over in Afghanistan? It was a relatively open state receptive to modernization until 1978 when, in a coup, the Communists took over and, to support their waning power, the Soviet Union militarily intervened, while the US and Pakistan provided arms to Muslim resistance (the Taliban was organized by the Pakistani secret service), and the rest is history… So it was the foreign interventions (Soviet Union, Pakistan, the US) which pushed a relatively peaceful and pluralist country towards a fundamentalist authoritarian rule. And, in a quite similar way, what pushes the Palestinians in the occupied territories towards Hamas’ brutal resistance is the fact that Israel does not allow the Palestinians under its control to organize themselves as an autonomous political agent – to cut a long story short, Israel “Hamasizes” the Palestinians to justify their ethnic cleansing and present the expansion of Israel “from the river to the sea” as an act of self-defence.

For this reason, the recognition of Palestine as a state and the clear condemnation of what Israel is doing in the occupied territories as a crime against humanity is the only way of not only putting the reins on Israel’s military terror against civilians but also to compel the Palestinians to act as a legitimate political force bound by international laws and rules. Lately, there have been some unexpected pleasant surprises in this direction. It is not only the student protesters who are active; Spain, Ireland, Norway all recognize Palestine, and other Western states are getting ready to do the same. On May 20 2024, France’s Foreign Ministry came out in support of the International Criminal Court and its issuing of arrest warrants for Israeli and Hamas leaders for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza and in Israel. In its warrant, the ICC does not make any direct comparisons between Israel and Hamas, except to say they have both committed crimes.[2] Days later, France was joined by Belgium and Germany.

No wonder the Biden administration is threatening sanctions on the ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan – US Senator Lindsey Graham warned, "if they'll do this to Israel, we’re next!"[3] Graham is right: until now, the ICC was automatically presupposed to deal with countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America, but now it wants to apply the so-called "rules-based international order" universally, with no exceptions. I find these procedures important precisely because they do not reject universal human rights as just a tool of Western domination: they take them more seriously than they were meant.

This threat not only comes from the Western hypocritical advocacy of universal rights: in one or another way, all big power blocks today play the same hypocritical game. It is not only that universal rules are not consistently applied – there is also a false “universality” which puts aggressors and victims on the same footing. Here is a recent incident which, as is often the case, made me ashamed of Slovene “leftists.” When, on May 23 2024, the Borkum, a freight ship that landed in the Slovene coastal town of Koper, rumours began to circulate that the ship was carrying arms destined for Israel, and, as expected, pro-Palestinian protesters immediately demanded the Slovene government prohibit the Borkum’s docking. But when a government agency explained that the ship’s destination was in fact the Czech Republic, not Israel, 43 protest organizations nonetheless added the following statement:

“Irrespective of what the final destination of the arms is - Israel, the Czech Republic or even the Ukraine - we are dealing with weapons for the armed forces of imperialist states which do not contribute to peace and do not defend working people. We, the signatories of this statement, advocate peace and oppose armament. Trafficking arms for imperialist wars is unacceptable.”[4]

I totally reject the underlying comparison between Israel’s destruction of Gaza with Ukraine’s defence against the Russian attack and the qualification of their desperate struggle for survival as an “imperialist war.” This is why Putin’s recent “free Palestine” pledge is a lie sustained by a factual truth – it serves to obfuscate the “free Ukraine” pledge brutally violated by Russia.

But there are now signs which give us some hope. On May 24 2024, the International Court of Justice, UN's top court, ordered Israel to "immediately halt" its military offensive in Rafah. ICJ rulings are final and binding, but the court doesn’t have a mechanism to enforce them.[5] Here cynics enter the game: such big public acts of condemnation are empty gestures which will not in any way significantly affect the situation on the battleground... in this case, such a cynical stance is clearly false. The proof is evident: we can all see how the pro-Israeli establishment reacted in panic to the ICC warrant and the moves to recognize Palestine. Jean-Paul Sartre put it in a precise way:

“When the authorities find it useful to tell the truth, it’s because they can’t find any better lie. Immediately this truth, coming from official mouths, becomes a lie corroborated by the facts.”[6]

This is largely the case with Western countries expressing “concerns” about the IDF violence in Gaza and on the West Bank: with all the criticism of the Israeli government, they continue to deliver arms to the IDF… However, Sartre’s thesis is not universal: there are ways of telling the truth which do not become a lie – recognizing Palestine as a state and obeying the ICC warrant for Netanyahu’s arrest as a war criminal are such cases. In today’s inflation of solemn declarations, we should never forget that all words are not equal, that there are still words which are not just factually true but which produce the effect of truth.

Most of us know well the culminating moment of A Few Good Men (Rob Reiner, 1992) when Tom Cruise addresses Jack Nicholson with “I want the truth!”, and Nicholson shouts back: “You can’t handle the truth!” This reply is more ambiguous than it may appear: it should not be taken as simply claiming that most of us are too weak to handle the brutal reality of things. If someone were to ask a witness about the truth of the holocaust, and the witness were to reply “You can’t handle the truth!”, this should not be understood as a simple claim that most of us are not able the process the horror of holocaust. At a deeper level, those who were not able to handle the truth were the Nazi perpetrators themselves: they were not able to accept the fact that their society is traversed by an all-encompassing antagonism, and to avoid this insight they engaged in the murdering spray that targeted the Jews, as if killing the Jews would re-establish a harmonious social body.

And therein resides the final lesson of the horrors in Gaza and in Ukraine: we do not only escape into a fantasy to avoid confronting reality, we also escape into reality (of brutal acts) to avoid the truth about the futility of our fantasies. Israel is escaping into the reality of destroying Gaza to avoid the truth about its predicament in the Middle East, in the same way that Russia is escaping into the realty of destroying Ukraine to avoid the truth about the futility of its Euroasian ideological fantasies. The stupid wisdom “Don’t just talk, do something!” should often be turned around: “Don’t just do things, say the right words!” 

---

[1] See Salman Rushdie Says A Free Palestine Would Be A "Taliban-Like State" (ndtv.com),

[2] France backs ICC after arrest warrant for Israeli, Hamas leaders (rfi.fr).

[3] US threates ICC, warning 'If they [prosecute] Israel, we're next!' (youtube.com).

[4] OROŽJE ZA IZRAEL NA LADJI BORKUM? Ob 17. uri pred mestno hišo v Kopru napovedan protest (regionalobala.si).

[5] See Live updates: Israel-Hamas war in Gaza, ICJ ruling, Rafah invasion looms (cnn.com).

[6] Quoted in Ian H. Birchall, Sartre Against Stalinism, New York: Berghahn Books, 2004, p. 166.