Israel Shamir and Slavoj Žižek

Despite my general aversion to Slavoj Žižek, I want to defend him against the misrepresentations found in Israel Shamir’s Counterpunch article from July 14^th titled “Doing a Full Monty for Tel Aviv: Žižek and the Gaza Flotilla“. As I will point out, Žižek is not above criticism but Shamir’s article is nothing but a hatchet job.

As is customary with Shamir, there is a tendency to make an amalgam between Israelis and Jews:

Without Europeans, passage of a pro-Palestinian resolution is unlikely – this as Europe agonizes over even the thought of upsetting Jews.

Never has Jewish stock climbed to such dizzy heights; it has surpassed its historical limits, ascending to loony peaks that bespeak the Dotcom madness of 2000.

This blurring of categories is typical of those who have not mastered a class analysis, a fault that regrettably is far too common with many Counterpunch contributors.

In order to answer Shamir, I forced myself to watch the entire Youtube video of Žižek’s talk to a small group of Israeli leftists. For the life of me, I can’t understand how he has become a celebrity on the left. Leaving aside the merits of his ideas, I find his “style” impossibly strained and irony-sodden to the point of capsizing.

Now, it is possible that a couple of the quotes Shamir attributed to Žižek that I could not find in the Youtube video were either made after the camera stopped rolling or were simply words put in his mouth. But leaving that aside, the more overarching question was one of reportorial accuracy. I simply could not recognize Žižek’s talk as an exercise in convincing his audience “that fighting anti-Semitism is more important than defending Palestinians.”

It is true that the talk was mostly about anti-Semitism but you cannot deduce from that any kind of hostility to the Palestinian cause. If Shamir were more of a serious student of Žižek’s views and willing to put in 10 minutes of background research he would realize that the talk was simply a recapitulation of an analysis that Žižek has been making for years. As the New Republic, an arch-Zionist publication, put it, “the form that Žižek’s remarks on Jews take is that of an exposition of the mentality of the anti-Semite.”

In other words, Žižek was interested in examining the difference between the anti-Semitism of a displaced Palestinian and that of an emerging right-populist/neo-fascist movement in Europe. He came down foursquare on the greater danger of the latter, while stressing the need for Arabs to eliminate anti-Semitism from their ranks. Shamir quoted Žižek as stating that “even the most oppressed and poor Palestinian should not be tolerated for being anti-Semitic.” Well, of course. This should be obvious. Not only is hatred of Jews as a people reactionary, it is also a weapon that the Zionists use against the Palestinian struggle. It would have been better for groups like Hamas and Hizbollah never to have made the kinds of verbal or written gaffes that allow Israeli leaders to demagogically liken them to the Nazis.

According to Shamir, Žižek said that “The real suffering, and the real problem, is European and American anti-Semitism”. He added, “Does the professor know something we don’t? Are European and American Jews being tortured in dark dungeons while their houses are confiscated by blue-eyed Aryans?” Now this is one of those quotes I could not pin down while watching the video, but it was clear to me that the real point was the one I alluded to above. For Žižek, there was much more of a history of genuine racial violence and oppression in Europe and America than there ever was in the Arab world. Furthermore, Žižek did not claim that there is any immediate threat of houses being confiscated but he was completely right to point out the growth of far-right movements in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union that hearken back to traditional anti-Semitism.

There’s another quote I could not locate: “The Slovenian philosopher spoke kindly of the swindler Bernie Madoff, who was ‘a scapegoat who was easy to blame, when in fact the real problem is the system that allowed and even pushed Madoff to commit his crimes‘”.

Now, I don’t know how “kindly” it is to characterize Madoff as a scapegoat, but Žižek is completely correct. By focusing so much on his Ponzi scheme, the media was able to portray the financial crisis as the work of “evil people” rather than the capitalist system itself. Shamir, who knows as much about Marxism based on the evidence of his writings as I do about the origins of the universe, would naturally be hostile to such an interpretation. As a crude conspiracy theorist who sees the Zionist lobby as a pulling the strings of the US government, he would naturally be disposed to seeing the economic system being run in the same fashion.

There is one quote that is disturbing and that I was able to pinpoint:

Žižek said that “someone from the Democratic Republic of Congo would sell his mother into slavery in a heartbeat for the chance to move to the West Bank”.

The problem is that Shamir omitted the words that immediately prefaced this, in which Žižek warned the audience that he was about to make a “provocative” statement. Žižek was talking about the tendency of some on the left to overstate the evil of Zionism, equating it with Nazism, etc. Clearly, a more precise characterization of Israeli society is required, especially in light of the left’s tendency to see fascism at all times and everywhere. Whenever I have run into such an equation, I tend to say, “No, Israel is not like Nazi Germany. It is much more like apartheid South Africa.”

This, however, points to a flaw in Žižek’s style, which is one of searching for attention—almost to the point of narcissism. The poor chap seems to hope for people to say something like “Did you hear what Žižek said?”, as if he were aspiring to be Marxism’s counterpart of Howard Stern. Clearly, a more grounded and measured approach is required.

Turning now to Shamir, the question of his anti-Semitism must be examined. Perhaps the most glaring example for most of his critics is an article titled “Bloodcurdling Libel” that is filled with weird theological free associations and essentialist humbug like this:

However, it is the belief in Jewish (not Palestinian) ritual child murders that was widespread and persistent. The old Jewish Encyclopaedia, Vol. III, 266, lists the following cases, beginning with William of Norwich: 5 other cases given for the twelfth century, 15 for the thirteenth, 10 for the fourteenth, 16 for the fifteenth, 13 for the sixteenth, 8 for the seventeenth, 15 for the eighteenth, and 39 for the nineteenth, going right up to the year 1900 (total 113). There have been more cases in the [6] 20th century. What is the reason for this belief? Was there a world-wide and centuries-spanning conspiracy to implicate innocent Jews in heinous crime or is there a crime behind accusations?

Normally, my instinct would lead me to get to the bottom of such a bizarre train of thought, but I realized that it would not be worth it. Clearly, you are dealing with a crank.

Most of Shamir’s articles that are written along these lines are not stereotypical racist attacks on Jews but rather attempts to give undue weight to those who make them. While such a distinction might be not worth making, I am simply trying to point out that the author is clever enough to have fooled the editors of Counterpunch who are a bit challenged when it comes to this sort of toxic waste.

Finally, let me differentiate myself a bit from Žižek on the question of “threats” to the Jews. While I agree that the Arabs are not the Nazis of today, I am less inclined than he is to fret about anti-Semitism as a serious looming “existential” menace to the Jews. Perhaps his lack of interest in social and economic history (i.e., historical materialism) explains his dwelling over “superstructure” but there is a world of difference between traditional anti-Semitism and the speech or writings of a Hamas leader or Ahmadinejad. The persecution of the Jews in Czarist Russia and Nazi Germany was intimately linked to the terminal decay of capitalism that could only resolved through war and the use of scapegoats.

We are decidedly moving into a deadly constellation of events that might precipitate new outbreaks of pogroms and even extermination but the targets will not be the Jews who are not easily identifiable through their isolation in ghettos or their economic role as pawnbrokers, shopkeepers, etc. Instead, it will be the Roma, the undocumented worker from Northern Africa, the Mexican, or the Arab.

The left has to be vigilant against any form of racialist stupidity, whether it comes from a disturbed individual lacking a social base like Israel Shamir or someone like Ahmadinejad who lacked the common sense to not invite David Duke to a symposium on the holocaust in Tehran. We do so primarily because their words weaken our movement by leaving it open to the charge of racism. This is especially a problem given the ability of the mass media to control the discourse and make the criminal into the victim and the victim into the criminal, as Malcolm X once put it.