We asked Zahi Zalloua and Benjamin Davis to comment on each other’s work. This essay is the third installment of the series; a final response from Davis will be posted next week. You can read the previous essay here.
Does beginning with negation risk foreclosing or overlooking practical political actions? Benjamin Davis believes that it might. He turns to the recent example of the struggle against ICE in Minnesota. About the general strike launched during this fight, Davis observes with good reason that the success of the event relied on multiple factors and legacies, from the spectacular (agitating for Black and Indigenous liberation) to the more mundane (agitating against privatization of garbage collection). The lesson here is that what drove Minnesotans to act in solidarity for a just cause was not an abstract meditation on the racial matrix of the human (what I allegedly solicit from my readers), but an empathetic orientation informed by concrete, pragmatic, and humanistic considerations: “Amidst these constraints recently in Minnesota, the call was not to dismantle the racial matrix of the human; in the bitter cold, Minnesotans were much busier drinking coffee with neighbors than reading critical theory.” Fair enough. But I wonder if the absence of “abstract” theory in this moment (it’s not about dismantling the master’s most valuable tool, the grammar of the human) is not without significant consequences.
Let’s stay with Minnesota. I think that we should return to the event of George Floyd’s murder. Weren’t these same Minnesotans poised to enact radical change vis-à-vis the police force? Something incredible happened: defunding the police was on the ballot in 2021. The proposed bill sought to remove the Minneapolis Police Department from the city charter and to replace it with a “public-health oriented” Department of Public Safety. The bill was, however, rejected by liberal voters (many of them I would speculate participated in the anti-ICE event celebrated by Davis). This example should remind us that there is a cruel ceiling to liberal empathy. Empathy after George Floyd didn’t produce any genuine change at the legislative level (even the stalled “George Floyd Justice in Policing Act” never aimed to change the landscape of policing; the Movement for Black Lives immediately objected to the bill, decrying its reformist character). The racist Law and Order thinking reared its ugly head, preventing a genuine confrontation with Minnesota’s/America’s addiction to white privilege. The “coloniality of our forms of life” reproduced itself. I’m not saying that more talk about dismantling the racial matrix of the human would have prevented the liberal capture of the movement’s most radical aspirations, but I’m skeptical of the move to de-theorize the situation on the ground. Praxis should not be set in opposition to theory. In its Marxist sense, action and theory should constantly shape one another.
Humanitarian empathy for Black folks, migrants, and Palestinians is not only insufficient (it must be supplemented by concrete actions), but it can be manipulative and cruelly fickle. I share Mohammed El-Kurd’s stance in Perfect Victims and the Politics of Appeal, in which he actively refuses to play the game of liberal empathy. A Palestinian worthy of empathy is a “good” Palestinian, a Palestinian who must let go of armed struggle, who must not be an agent of discord and discomfort. As El-Kurd states, “Palestinians must denounce certain affiliations, determined by the West, to be considered worthy of living. Or, I should correct myself, worthy of condolences, as we are doomed regardless” (Perfect Victims and the Politics of Appeal, 68). Palestine minus a reckoning with America’s racial matrix sets the liberal up for commiseration, not revolutionary.
My resistance to empathy deserves more clarification. Davis might sympathize with Martin Jay’s project to reduce the empathy deficit among Israelis and Palestinians. But as I see it, Jay displays the danger of empathy when it is entertained as a novel and transformative idea without an adequate account of settler colonialism. Though Jay places emphasis on the Israeli side, calling upon Jewish Israelis to enact the Hebrew Bible’s “empathy clause,” he does flirt with a victim-blaming logic when he intimates that Palestinians could have displayed more empathy and welcomed Jews fleeing pogroms in Europe: “It is tempting in retrospect to speculate about the outcome of a more empathetic response to the Zionist dream on the part of the indigenous Arab population during this transitional period” (“The Vicissitudes of Empathy: Reflections on the Israel-Palestine Conflict,” 484-85). Empathy for others—when they are invaders seeking to dispossess and kill you—is politically either naïve or delusional, and certainly a losing proposition for Palestinians.
In reading Jay’s response to my critique in the pages of the Journal of Genocide Research, I was reminded of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ reaction to his hostile interview on CBS This Morning about his new book, The Message, which includes a significant portion on his trip to the West Bank and Israel. Tony Dokoupil, one of the morning anchors, started lecturing Coates on what the author left out of his analysis:
Why leave out that Israel is surrounded by countries that want to eliminate it? Why leave out that Israel deals with terror groups that want to eliminate it? Why not detail anything of the First and the Second Intifada, the cafe bombings, the bus bombings, the little kids blown to bits? And is it because you just don’t believe that Israel, in any condition, has a right to exist?
To be sure, Jay has more interpretive grace than Dokoupil, but he still reiterates what has become a reflexive defense of Zionism: it is more complicated than a settler-colonial ideology; rather, it is better understood as a set of beliefs that speaks to a serious menace to Jews around the world and particularly in West Asia. But what Jay fails to acknowledge is that the narrative about Zionism as a movement exclusively about self-determination and liberation from anti-Semitism is reiterated ad nauseam by Israeli politicians, US politicians from both sides of the aisle, Western corporate media, and a number of Holocaust scholars, who downplay the genocide happening in Gaza or explain it away by Israel’s existential predicament as it is surrounded by Hamas, the new Nazis (others indulge in more subtleties: the campaign didn’t start out genocidal, though it “tragically” became so, as Omer Bartov recently argued).
Coates’ response to Dokoupil hits the target:
“Well, I would say the perspective that you just outlined, there is no shortage of that perspective in American media. That’s the first thing I would say. I am most concerned always with those who don’t have a voice, with those who don’t have the ability to talk. I have asked repeatedly in my interviews whether there is a single network, mainstream organization in America with a Palestinian American bureau chief or correspondent who actually has a voice to articulate their part of the world. I’ve been a reporter for 20 years. The reporters of those who believe more sympathetically about Israel and its right to exist don’t have a problem getting their voice out. But what I saw in Palestine, what I saw on the West Bank, what I saw in Haifa, in Israel, what I saw in the South Hebron Hills, those were the stories that I have not heard.”
In his response to me, Martin Jay observes: “Edward Said may have once said that Palestinians have been denied permission to narrate, but that is thankfully no longer the case. Zalloua’s assertion that there is no oxygen for those who do so is belied by the growing global shift in attitudes towards the conflict” (“Anti-Empathy and the Mirage of a Secular Bi- National State Solution: A Response to Nitzan Lebovic and Zahi Zalloua,”505). Yes and no. College students are learning about Israel as an apartheid regime and a settler-colonial state. Palestinian activists, scholars, and artists have unquestionably started to narrate their plight and its impact on a younger generation is significant. But when that body of knowledge is repeatedly and systematically dismissed as anti-Semitic by most of those with access to the levers of power in the US and other Western nations, as the kind of stuff that you would find in the backpack of an extremist (I’m alluding to Dokoupil’s imbecilic comment about Coates’s The Message), doubling down on settler colonialism is a plea to return us to a framework that might help us challenge and change the coordinates of the public discourse about Palestinian resistance: beginning to see Israelis as victimizers, occupiers, or invaders of Palestinian land is already having a transformative impact on protesters who are calling for a ceasefire and/or a free Palestine.
My wager is that Jay’s call for empathy (and maybe Davis’s) will resonate mostly with those protesters demanding only a ceasefire, who show up only when Palestine makes the nightly news. The Left needs a message that will help convince protesters to agitate for both a cessation of gratuitous violence and a free Palestine. The former can be met in multiple ways; the latter needs a political framework with anti-colonial teeth and ontological heft—one capable of articulating the continuity from the ’48 Nakba to the ongoing Gaza genocide.
I don’t believe that Davis needs to be convinced of the merits of the settler-colonial framework, but such a framework cannot be decoupled from deliberations over the racial matrix of the human. Students for Justice in Palestine have cut their teeth on Fanon and decolonization. For them, and many of us, decolonizing the mind (of the colonizer and colonized) is not a luxury. It requires ontological upheavals, now. During the “No King protests” SJP students weren’t waving American flags; some waved Palestinian flags as they boldly did during the earlier encampments.
Unlike Said, who believed that Zionists could reform themselves and change their murderous mode of sovereignty absent de-Zionizing (Said deemed the language “apocalyptic”; does Davis deem it unnecessary?), I stay with the negative. Thinking with the Afropessimists allows me to frame the question of Palestine in ontological terms (without simultaneously reifying Palestinian being as the exceptional wretched), something Fayez Sayegh, in 1967, had precisely observed: “The being of Israel is the non-being of Palestine.” Zionist ontology fractures Palestinian being. Zionist existence is premised on Palestinian destruction. For a Zionist Israel to flourish, Palestinians must die or disappear.
Davis faults me for not being sufficiently reconstructive, arguing that my theoretical interventions leave the reader only with “negation and despair.” Yes, there is plenty of negation in my work, but negation doesn’t open to despair but a “courage of hopelessness” (an idea introduced by Giorgio Agamben and developed by Slavoj Žižek). It takes courage to be hopeless. The liberal path leads to a dead-end, and so do the ways of empathy. It is hard pill to swallow, I know, but we must.
The chant “Palestinian Lives Matter” signals, repeats, and harnesses the universalist cry of “Black Lives Matter.” The message is crystal clear: Negate, negate again, negate better. The moral rot runs deep. The acts of racialization and animalization that we’re witnessing in America and Palestine are not instances of bad apples, evil prime ministers, or isolated, complicit presidents. They are not bugs but features of the global system: racial violence is a structural necessity for the function of the world order. Critical theory must be better equipped in its praxis to combat a pervasive whiteness/Zionism that colonizes everything and hails everyone (to be a particular kind of anti-Black, anti-Palestinian subject).
My critical theory is not allergic to legal theory. I welcome Davis’s “experimental spaces.” In my teaching and writings, I’m constantly thinking with Michelle Alexander’s the New Jim Crow, Derrick Bell’s racial realism and interest-convergence thesis, and Sadiya Hartman’s afterlife of slavery—and the Black pessimism that it powerfully generates. Human rights discourse wasn’t always governed by humanitarian reason. The language of human rights can and must be leveraged to advance the plight of the most vulnerable (and remind Western publics that an occupation force doesn’t have the right to self-defense, but an occupied people does). But the law can liberate you with one hand as it dispossesses you with the other. What is freedom without dignity? You are now free, but you are free not to flourish, but to starve. We must sit with Hartman’s “nonevent of emancipation.” Black survival depends on it.
Critical theory must center the unflinching pessimism that emerges in both Critical Race Theory and Critical Black Studies. And this need not be at the expense of affirmation. As did Fanon, I adopt a two-pronged attitude to human existence in a ferocious racist world: “Yes to life. Yes to love. Yes to generosity. But man is also a no. No to scorn of man. No to degradation of man. No to exploitation of man. No to the butchery of what is most human in man: freedom” (Black Skin, Skin, White Masks, 197). There is no “new (post)humanism” (or Davis’s another humanity) without a full engagement with the zone of nonbeing and the cruel liberal traps of/into the zone of being.
Critical theory’s negativity is simultaneously a No! to colonial domination and Yes! to Palestinian liberation, a No! to supremacist ambitions and a Yes! to Black liberation. It doesn’t only decline today’s soul-crushing imperative to obey in advance; its penchant, we might say, is to disobey in advance, to enact refusals and inventions that serve as counter-practices—and instances of unlearning—to a voracious system masterfully adept at pacifying and punishing its critics.
