Racial And Ethnic Essentialism Make Everything Worse, Israel/Palestine Edition. By Jesse Singal

Okay, one more take

Jesse Singal

16 Oct 2023

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jessesingal.substack.com

Jesse Singal

8 - 10 minutes

I’m working on a very long follow-up to this piece about Coleman Hughes’s TED Talk on color blindness that is mercifully divorced from the news, and that I think some of you will find potentially interesting and informative. But it’s not ready yet, and in the meantime I’ve got something else to say about the unfolding Israeli-Palestinian catastrophe.

This is about The Discourse. I understand The Discourse isn’t the most important thing right now. The Middle East isn’t my usual area and other than being horrified at what’s developing, I have few substantive insights. I’m going to focus on The Discourse because it’s an area that bridges my own interests to the conflict. 

One of my most consistent themes in this newsletter has been my dislike of identity essentialism. Claims that groups of people, as defined by identity characteristics like race, ethnicity, nationality, sexual orientation, or gender identity, share some internal essence or other characteristic tend to stupefy and obscure rather than to edify.

While I don’t want to focus too much on the torrent of ridiculous online takes that have been generated by the massacre and by Israel’s subsequent reprisal attacks and (as I type this) imminent invasion of Gaza, it provides some prime examples that I can’t resist pointing out.

The popular communist writer Malcolm Harris, for example, tweeted: “Very weird discourse from liberals this week that’s been like ‘Sure you’ll oppose the crimes of your own extremely powerful government, but the real moral test is whether you’ll condemn the actions of the most marginalized people on earth when they have no other option [eyes emoji].’ ”

It wasn’t “the most marginalized people on earth” who committed the massacre against Israelis, though. It was operatives of Hamas, the political movement that, while initially elected in 2006, now rules Gaza dictatorially. The idea that Palestinians “have no other option” but to massacre Israelis is. . . I don’t have the word for it, exactly. It almost feels like some strange inversion of the noble savage trope. Of course Palestinians trapped in Gaza are bereft of options in various brutally unjust ways, but to say they have “no other option” but to commit depraved acts of murder and kidnapping against Israeli citizens is just bonkers.

This is why essentialism is dumb. If you look at Gaza and see a big, undifferentiated mass of people for whom it is coherent to say they collectively “have no other option” than one very particular attack planned by a very particular group, you have, of course, lost the plot. And as is often the case with essentialism, an opinion like this makes it more difficult to understand what’s really going on. Because of course Palestinians themselves are one of the biggest victims of Hamas in various ways. You’re not helping or valuing Palestinian lives by painting them all with such a broad brush — you’re ignoring the fact that one of the forces constraining their options and, in many cases, worsening and endangering their lives, is Hamas itself.

The essentialism discourse gets even stupider when it comes to the settler-colonizer versus noble resister trope. 

A freelance writer named Najma Sharif got piled on (understandably!) for tweeting last Saturday, long before the initial body count was in: “What did y’all think decolonization meant? vibes? papers? essays? Losers.” Then, in a follow-up tweet: “ ‘not like this’ then like what. Show us LOL[.]”

The tweet was liked by Karen Attiah, a Washington Post columnist. (Yes, you are remembering correctly that former WaPo staffer Dave Weigel got suspended for a month, without pay, for retweeting a dumb and arguably sexist joke. You are also remembering correctly that that joke did not endorse the murder or kidnapping of civilians, female or otherwise.) 

In a remarkable passage from her column published on Friday, Attiah wrote:

    Language is being hijacked. People using the terms “decolonization” and “liberation” in describing Palestinians’ struggle for human rights have had their remarks taken out of context and have been accused of championing Hamas’s brand of terrorism. This not only silences debate on the illegal, morally unjust occupation of Palestinian territory, but also implies a subconscious, irrational fear of oppressed minorities anywhere rising up and exacting violent revenge.

Taken out of context! Irrational fear! There’s a word I’m so tempted to deploy here, but it has been overused to within an inch of its life, so I’ll restrain myself. 

Anyhow, in this view, the Hamas operatives are taking part in a “decolonization” effort. While Sharif didn’t go this route, this view of the conflict is often framed in the terms of American-style race talk — Palestinians are the oppressed “people of color,” while Israelis are the “white” colonizers. This makes for a nicely prepackaged conflict, especially if you are American with certain political leanings and a deficit of curiosity or cognitive flexibility.

But if you de-essentialize things, you’ll see that this doesn’t really apply, at least not cleanly. Israel is about 80% Jewish, and more than half of the Jewish population consists of so-called Mizrahis who trace their recent lineage to the Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia, according to a recent-ish paper based on a representative sample of Israelis: “Mizrahi Jews are the largest of the Jewish sub-groups constituting 44.9% of the sample compared to Ashkenazi Jews who constitute 31.8% of our sample.” Ashkenazis are the ones who trace their recent lineage to Europe (like me), and they’re stereotypically closer to the concept of being “white,” although for the love of God/Allah/whatever, have a little self- and historical-awareness if you’re going to call us that in such a reductive way. 

Most Mizrahis are in Israel today because their forebears were driven out of Muslim-majority countries after Israel declared independence in 1948. “After the Arab defeat in the 1948 war, Jews became hostages in the hands of the Arab military dictatorships, and there was even fear of another Holocaust,” wrote the Israeli sociologist Sammy Smooha in an article about the difficulties the Mizrahi faced when they arrived in Israel (they have traditionally been the underclass of Israeli Jews, though that’s changing a bit, and also they have way better food). It’s important not to overgeneralize here; the midcentury situation of Jews in Muslim lands varied from place to place, as the well-cited Wikipedia page on “Jewish exodus from the Muslim world” notes, but we’re talking Iraq, Yemen, Libya, countries like that. That is, places most American leftists and progressive consider to be populated by “people of color,” to use that increasingly pointless formulation. 

These countries, and so many others in that part of the world, had Jewish communities, living and working with varying degrees of acceptance and oppression and integration, for centuries. None of them do anymore. The entire region, other than Israel, has been wiped clean of Jews, with the exception of tiny pockets still hanging on here and there. So Mizrahis constitute the descendants of refugees “of color” by most American leftists’ definitions of these terms (though apparently Jews often don’t count). (Many Ashkenazi Jews in Israel are also the descendants of refugees, of course! But we’re talking about the imposition of American racial categories so I’m focusing on the ones of recent non-European descent.)

Of course none of this resolves any of the moral claims, and none of this is to deny the long history of Palestinian dispossession that helps fuel this conflict. “My family was brutalized and expelled!” is not justification to inflict brutality and expulsion on others, and in the West Bank, yes, there are bona fide Israeli Jewish settlers.

All I am saying is that to frame last weekend’s massacre in evil colonizer/noble resister terms, let alone to frame the whole conflict this way, doesn’t help anyone — least of all Palestinians. It’s delusional on multiple counts.

Questions? Comments? Bulletproof solutions to the unfolding crisis? I’m at singalminded@gmail.com. Image: Demonstrators at the Milan for Palestine demonstration in support of the Palestinian population in Piazza Duca D'Aosta on October 14, 2023 in Milan, Italy. (Photo by Alessandro Bremec/NurPhoto via Getty Images)