For our new special issue on violence, I commissioned Jacob Abolafia to write about the left’s fascination with and embrace of violence. Jacob is an Israel-based American political theorist and leftist activist who teaches philosophy at Ben-Gurion University in the Negev. In his piece, “Violence and the Left,” which is framed as a review of Adam Kirsch’s On Settler Colonialism, Jacob argues that despite all that Kirsch gets wrong, he gets something important right. “The left’s flirtation with political violence, with ‘the resistance’ in Gaza, with unrealized uprisings at home,” he writes, “occupy the place where an understanding of effective means and a vision of emancipatory ends should be.” There are few people that I find more helpful to talk to about Israel-Palestine than Jacob, and I’m happy to be able to share one such conversation with our readers here—about the failures of violence and nonviolence, and what people abroad should be calling for today.
To read Jacob’s essay in full click here, and to explore the rest of our issue subscribe now.
Anastasia Berg: The essay you published with us, “Violence and the Left,” takes a critical stance against a tendency on the left vis-à-vis violence. What is this tendency?
Jacob Abolafia: The piece is not a cri de coeur or plea for nonviolence. It’s really an analysis of a tendency on the left toward abstraction from politics. I wanted to ask: What does violence actually mean when these left intellectuals are talking about it? Are they talking about politics? Or are they talking about something else?
I was interested in what happens when you take certain left-wing theories and claim that they apply to politics, and in the piece I am trying to show the cracks that emerge when you talk about violence as something abstract, rather than thinking deeply about the cases at hand. What made me totally sure I had to write the piece was the left’s self-satisfaction that its political answers are so obvious and true that no self-criticism around the relationship of left-wing ideas to politics is necessary.
There’s a fear on the left that if we critique violence or the violence of certain actors, we’re being bad allies, or we’re not on the left anymore. I do not have a problem critiquing violence, and one of the things that was motivating me to write this essay is that, actually, I think a critique of violence is the most left-wing thing we could possibly do.
Walter Benjamin was sort of in the back of my mind while I was writing the piece. The critique of violence is part of left politics, precisely because it helps us think about the sort of system we want in the end. I think violence is not to be avoided at all costs, but its value is in its ability to get us the nonviolent equilibrium that we want.
AB: What are the left-wing ideas you’re thinking of—and how are they applied to the case of Israel-Palestine?
JA: The piece is, in a way, a review of Adam Kirsch’s book On Settler Colonialism, although it is operating on two levels. I’m sort of reviewing that book, but also reviewing the tendency on the left to say that that book is not serious.
Kirsch’s thesis is basically that “settler colonialism” is this academic monster that has swallowed up left politics—where everything gets viewed according to the paradigm of colonizer/colonized, indigenous/nonindigenous, and that the politics that emerges from that is zero-sum. And that if the main academic prism for viewing the social world is settler colonialism, then the only politics that can emerge from that—because the settler emerged out of nowhere and stole from the indigenous their rightful inheritance—is a sort of zero-sum politics where you give back to the indigenous what was taken from the colonists.
But in addition to this uncovering of settler colonialism as a central paradigm for left thinking, there’s the claim that the politics that emerges out of that is bad and harmful; it can lead to the endorsement of horrific violence but also, and maybe more commonly, encourages a framework and a rhetoric that precludes real political solutions.
AB: Your own acquaintance with this issue is not just theoretical—you’re not just a reviewer of the book, you’re not just a scholar, you’re not just familiar with the issues. How would you define yourself and your position vis-à-vis the situation in Palestine and Israel? Would you say you’re an activist, or something else?
JA: Scholar-activist, I guess. I once taught a course with someone who described themselves as a scholar-farmer. And if they could be a scholar-farmer, then I think I can be a scholar-activist.
I have been a nonviolent activist in Israel-Palestine for about ten years now. And I have always been principally committed to nonviolent activism. I've never theorized that commitment, actually—the commitment has been very embodied and practical. I just felt that the last thing that this place needed was more violence. Violence didn’t seem to be conducive to the political ends that I wanted. Now, as I also reveal in the piece, it turns out that nonviolence doesn’t work either. So I come at this discussion from the position of somebody who’s been deeply committed to nonviolence and understands that nonviolence has failed politically. But I don’t think that that excuses the turn to a violence without sufficient motivation.
There's a big question right now in the discourse: Well, when is violence sufficiently motivated? You know, for instance: Mahmoud Khalil, when he talks about October 7th, he says, I’m against all war crimes and all killing of civilians, but this was going to happen. And that’s one position: that violence is inevitable, and that you can’t condemn anti-colonial violence, because it’s inevitable by the very nature of the political constellation. And I don’t think that’s obviously true. I think it's a position that needs to be argued for, and sometimes the left takes it as obvious that violence is unavoidable in postcolonial situations, and there are certain watchwords that get used to adduce that fact. Left intellectuals will sometimes say: Of course it’s obvious that we need not be afraid of violence—Algeria. Look what happened in Algeria! Or Fanon—just say the word, and that’s all you need. The point of the piece is not to criticize someone like Mahmoud Khalil. I completely understand why he would say that, based on his position and personal experiences. Instead I’m trying to ask, from the left, why left intellectuals aren’t questioning those watchwords. What would happen if we were to question those watchwords?
The activist part of me is also questioning this because I’ve watched every single Palestinian community that I work with be affected. Some have been cleansed. Some have evaporated. They don’t exist anymore. I’ve watched my friends be murdered. If one side is nonviolent and the other side is violent, there’s a game-theoretical problem there.
So I’m not sure what my own political practice looks like, but I am sure that the voices I was hearing and am hearing in the Anglophone left don’t seem to be providing political answers that speak to me—as a scholar or as an activist. They don’t stand up to critical inquiry, and they don’t tell me what I should be doing. If my nonviolence isn’t working, what would? Invoking Fanon and Algeria—these are not helpful words anymore, and certainly not in this situation.
AB: You say quite confidently, “My nonviolence doesn’t work.” And I wonder what you mean by that. You could mean that the practice that you have been engaged in hasn’t yet brought peace on earth, but somebody could say, in a future that’s very hard to imagine right now, the movement could grow. Or is there something else you’re getting at when you say that nonviolence doesn’t work?
JA: Nonviolence can work, but just like violence, it needs to be a means to an end. And the principle behind the sort of nonviolence that I was involved in, which is usually called “protective presence,” is that the presence of activists will deter state violence and the violence of, in this case, settlers—non-state paramilitary violence. But the problem is this: when one’s presence doesn't protect from state-sponsored violence, suddenly the theory of change doesn’t exist. Either the activists themselves can be subject to sufficient violence to deter them or, simply, violence that happens when activists aren’t around goes unpunished. Short of all activists living with all Palestinians all the time, there will be times when there aren’t activists present. And if murder can be committed with impunity, even when an activist is present, let alone when they're not, then you just don’t have a theory of change anymore.
We remember the Turkish American activist Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi, who was murdered in the West Bank a year ago. When an American can be murdered with impunity, a fortiori a Palestinian can be murdered with impunity. It shows that violence against Palestinians is so deeply acceptable to the state and the society that witnessing is no longer enough. Witnessing is ineffective.
AB: Going forward, will this change what you do, in your own activist practice?
JA: Absolutely. I guess the place where I’m at is looking for cases of effective action. One of the lessons of the piece is that if you want to look for inspiration you have to look at the cases that provide a politics that you’d actually want to endorse. Nonviolence is great in that way—India got a constitutional democracy. That’s what anybody who holds the values of the left should want. South Africa—you get an imperfect constitutional democracy, but still a constitutional democracy; great. India achieved those ends through a famously nonviolent campaign, though of course it was nonviolent in complicated ways. And South Africa used a mix of violence and nonviolence. Those are the places I would be looking to.
Regarding Israel-Palestine, I think the case of South Africa is much more appropriate than the case of India for a whole bunch of reasons. And if we take the South African case as an analogy, what are its differences from the paradigmatic settler-colonial cases that failed, like Algeria? And how do we operationalize it?
The left often has its favored cases, and then it justifies whatever happened on the ground against the canonized politics of settler colonialism. And I think we need to do exactly the opposite. That is, look at the politics on the ground first. Look for cases and do reflective comparison between them to figure out what sort of politics is going to get us the result we want. And the piece I wrote for the last issue is, in a sense, brush clearing—clearing ground to help people realize that we need to pick our cases according to the political reality we have, not according to the canon that we know and love.
AB: What do you think makes violence in the context of Israel-Palestine so misguided as a strategy right now?
JA: The overwhelming force that Israel is able to bring. And the fact that Israelis do not see themselves as having a metropole to return to. This is one of the big confusions between settler-colonial theory and the case of Israel-Palestine. It’s not that Israel-Palestine is not a case of settler colonialism. It is, in the dry academic sense. And I think a lot of left intellectuals love to sort of jump up and down and say, “Oh, but look at the Anglo-Palestine Colonial Bank or, you know, the Jewish Colonization Initiative. They called themselves colonizers!” As if that were some sort of “aha!” moment that gives you a helpful politics.
Violence is only going to lead Israelis to double down. That is what has happened. That’s what happened in the Nineties. That’s what has happened today. And there are some defenders of Hamas’s strategy of violence, who say, “Ah, but now you’re talking about the occupation!” as if that were some sort of success. I think a left position has to be that we don’t play three-dimensional chess with the future. We rather look to the 70, 80, 90,000 people who are dead and say, Well, no, that’s a political failure. That’s a failure of emancipation. This sort of goes back to Walter Benjamin. Those are lives that will not be lived. That’s not the left notion of emancipation.
AB: So if I’m hearing you correctly, what you’re saying is that violence has to be conceivably construed as a means to an end, and the conditions that don’t hold in this case are: one, that the idea of some kind of resettlement of Jews in an original home is a complete fantasy, and two, Israel has the power to meet any kind of violence with untold devastation.
JA: Yeah. I mean, as someone who lives there, I would say—and all the Palestinians I know, and people like Rashid Khalidi, or Edward Said in his time, would say this as well—this is going to be a negotiated, a partnered solution. And violence, by its very nature, is zero-sum. It's not negotiated. It's not partnered.
Of course, Israel is the agent levying the rapacious, unmeasured, irrational force of violence right now. But the answer to that, the answer to one zero-sum action can’t be another zero-sum action, if you want to reach the equilibrium condition, which I do, and everyone else I know who wants a just and democratic Middle East does.
Violence just doesn’t get us there, or at least not violence that doesn’t have a clear aim in mind. I don’t see the clear aim in mind in the leftist endorsements of violence that I analyze in my piece.
AB: Right, you don’t dismiss violence entirely as a possibility. This isn’t a piece about pacifism, despite what you now describe as your own nonviolent tendencies, even pre-theorized ones. You acknowledge that, both historically and in principle, violence can be wielded if it could bring about the right kind of ends. Do you have a sense of what the legitimate criteria should be for using violence? And I also wonder: Somebody might then say, Oh, okay, so really your disagreement with the left is just that you have a different set of criteria… Is there something deeper at stake in your disagreement about when it is okay to use violence?
JA: This returns us to the Kirsch book, in that I’m interested in an ambiguity about this on the left. Kirsch’s argument is that once you start thinking according to the settler-colonial paradigm, you will come out with a sort of politics where: settler equals bad, indigenous equals good. And he’s not only thinking about Israel-Palestine, he’s thinking about the U.S. as well—you know, a politics where the left is hopeless about the United States, about liberal democracy, because it’s corrupted, in an Edenic sense, by the original sin of settler colonialism. He never says the phrase “1619 Project,” but that’s clearly part of what he’s thinking about. That’s a polemical charge. But the interesting question is, are there moral categories motivating the left’s use of violence?
And there’s a sort of realism that’s motivating my thinking in this piece, which is: moral categories like that don’t belong in left politics. They should not be part of it. What we ought to be interested in is judging things from the aspect of the universal respect for human beings as equals. And there aren’t antecedent moral categories that should affect our thinking around that. I think some people on the left are guilty of what Kirsch is accusing them of—the utter collapse of settler colonialism as a paradigm of historical development and the normative categories of contemporary politics—but for others, I think, it's more subtle, where moralism starts creeping into a left politics and getting in the way of what I take to be the more fundamental guiding principles of equal respect for persons.
One of the most common questions I’ve gotten about this piece has been people asking me: Well, who are you talking about here? And I’m talking about the Anglophone left, which is a sort of broad and nebulous category. I don’t want to make sweeping pronouncements. And within the conversation that I want to have and the people I’m talking about, there’s a range of positions. Some of them are guilty exactly of what Kirsch accuses them of. Others are simply willing to moralize rather than think politically, and that’s what I’m trying to get away from.
AB: How did you come to see things in this way? You said earlier you always tended towards nonviolence but was violence ever attractive to you? Was there a romantic flurry where at some point you did want to charge at the tank… and then subsequently became disillusioned?
JA: For me, it’s quite the opposite. Of course I felt the attraction of violence: I read far too much Nietzsche as an undergraduate. I aestheticized violence in my own way. But that was before I was on the left.
I’m just going to parrot Benjamin all day here, but the aestheticization of politics and the glorification of violence that comes with that is the natural patrimony of the right. And I flirted with a sort of right critique of modernity, which I outgrew the first time that I saw fascism in the street. The key moment for me was someone chucking a bottle at my head during a demonstration in Israel. By that point, I was already drifting toward the left; I was in no way on the right. But that clarified things for me. That, you know, this is what political violence looks like, and I can’t beat it by throwing a bottle back at him. There’s just no theory of change. There’s no victory that way. The way I can win is by getting this fascist to be ostracized by society, and to get society to see that he is the problem.
That was in 2014. Eleven years later, it’s obvious that I have lost in every conceivable sense. In every society that I’m a part of, the person chucking the bottle is now deeply empowered, if not in power, across the world. But at no point in those eleven years has it seemed to me like, Well, if I had just mucked things up more violently, I could have stopped the rise of fascism. The rise of fascism needed to be stopped politically. It needed to be stopped mostly through electoral politics. My failures were all electoral failures. They weren’t a failure of not being violent enough.
AB: In your piece, you write a bit about what’s behind the left’s attraction to violence. Why do you think your fellow leftists aren’t finding your perspective more appealing?
JA: I’m going to return to this question of abstraction. I was on a campus in the U.S. on October 7th, and I saw an encampment go up immediately. And it was clear to me that for everyone at that encampment, the actual goings-on in Israel-Palestine were abstract. Had to be abstract. Nobody at that encampment had been to the places that I had been. And I don’t mean Israel-Palestine. I mean a village being ethnically cleansed in the West Bank, the Gaza border. And so that abstraction, that distance, is the most important ingredient.
Most Israelis don’t go to the West Bank, either. They’re able to hold the politics they do, the fascist and apartheidist politics they do, because they don’t have to look the people they’re doing it to in the eye. And one aspect of politics that I’ve shifted on is that I’m a great believer in integrationism. Elizabeth Anderson wrote a book on this a few years ago, The Imperative of Integration. I just see the difference between the politics that is possible when the problem is concrete, versus the politics that develops when it’s abstract—you know, a set of ideas or principles clashing with one another, or an imagined enemy to contend with. So that’s one issue, this abstraction.
The other is the feeling that, once we’ve figured out the principles of emancipatory politics, how could we not do everything in our power to make those principles come true? Since the French Revolution, there has been a tendency on the left to fall for that. The examples are too numerous and odious to recount, but I think there’s a deep temptation on the left to be so certain that we’ve figured out the principles of justice, and therefore we figured out the politics that will get us to justice. And that entails, of course, a romanticization of violence. Violence is beautiful. Anyone who’s watched a war movie knows that, anyone who’s put up a poster of Che Guevara in their dorm as well. You know, from the sublime to the ridiculous, from the deep tragedy of emancipatory thinking’s tendency towards violence, to the ease of romanticizing a distant and abstract political movement, I think all of that’s at play. There’s no easy answer.
AB: Your ambition for the piece, from the very start, as we were discussing the essay early on, was to offer a critique of the left that wasn’t just meant for people already critical of the left, to give them more ammunition. Your ambition was to appeal to people on the left who might find these sorts of arguments in favor of violence appealing, but not so appealing that they couldn’t read the essay and be disabused of this confusion. But if not this, then what?
Specifically, with regard to the situation in Israel-Palestine, do you think there’s anything people abroad—particularly in the U.S.—can be doing right now that would be meaningful? What actions would be effective and not just futile, or impotent, or confused? You mentioned the encampments earlier. Were there things you saw there where you thought, Yeah, this is what I wish all these college kids were doing or, this is what I wish people would be willing to put their energy and their time into. What would you say to people who are feeling lost, who want to do something, but they don’t know what to do?
JA: Bernie Sanders’s resolution on the floor of the Senate to take military funding away from Israel—that’s it. The hope that even centrist Democrats, people like Amy Klobuchar, would vote for that, that’s the most hopeful thing I can say.
If the case of South Africa suggests that that’s what you have to do to convince a population that enjoys privileges from its violent oppression of another part of the population, and that’s what you need to do to get that population to give up those privileges and decide it’s in their own best interest to make a real constitutional democracy—well, the parallels are there for everyone to see. Not all ways toward liberation are equal, but the tools of an emancipatory pressure campaign are there for the taking.
But I don’t want to suggest that I’m critical of the idea of the encampments—some of their practices, maybe. But they had the right idea. Often, they had the exact right ask. These institutions should be critically looking at what sort of pressure can be put on Israeli society, such that the average Israeli decides that it’s in his or her best interests not to treat the Palestinians the way they treat them. But the ask got buried in, like, Hamas apologetics, or “glory to the resistance.” And, you know, those two things actually don’t go together.
What I as someone on the left am asking myself, what I think anyone should be asking themselves is: What could make someone change their mind? Right now, Israelis are not asking themselves that question, and it’s clear that violence hasn’t made them ask themselves that question. In fact, if anything, it’s pushed them further from asking that question.
AB: Are you hopeful that, if such external pressures were levied, Israelis would change their minds and their approach? For one thing, there’s a question: Are they doing what they’re doing in Gaza and the West Bank because it is serving their best interests? And, secondly, they’re pretty stubborn, I hear.
JA: I think right now, Israelis don’t pay a cost for doing what they’re doing. Some people would say the cost they pay is the war, but from an internal Israeli perspective, the war is just something that’s always been going on. It’s not the consequence of a particular set of factors. And more violence isn’t going to convince Israelis to the contrary. So, I don’t know if it would work. I don’t know. But to me, it’s the great untried thing. It has not been tried. You know, the stock exchange over the course of the war in Israel has only gone up and up and up, and it’s hard to get people to see that something is wrong if they are not just morally closed off to it, but also it doesn’t really affect them.
Some of this is simply despair. I thought for many years that I could win politically through nonviolence and an internal political vision of Jewish-Arab cooperation, so the turn toward something like external pressure—or encouraging the left to double down on the lessons of external pressure—is born of my own personal failure and the failure of all other alternatives that I’ve seen, violent and nonviolent.
Read Jacob’s essay in full here.
Image: Protesters on the campus of Drexel University (source: Instagram / ADL)
Further reading on The Point’s Substack…
Rachel Wiseman’s interview with our cover photographer, Jordan Conway.
A preview of Alex Rollins Berg’s review of cinematic violence from issue 35.
Our issue 35 sources
plus, more author interviews coming soon…
I thought this offered a really useful perspective.
Great essay and interview