Over the past two months, as Israel has waged a genocidal war in Gaza, killing more than 19,000 people, more than a third of them children, Western philosophers have come under criticism for their positions on the matter. These self-proclaimed beacons of morality and ethics have either condoned war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and forcible evacuations or taken ambivalent positions on them. For example, on November 13, German philosophers Jürgen Habermas, Nicole Deitelhoff, Rainer Forst, and Klaus Guenther issued a statement in support of Israel, rejecting the term genocide in reference to its actions in Gaza and claiming that Hamas’s October 7 attack intended to “eliminate Jewish life in general”. Habermas subsequently became the subject of a social media meme that asked “do you condemn Habermas?” mocking the repeated insistence on condemning Hamas that Palestinians interviewed by Western media outlets face. While Habermas’s position is hardly surprising, the writings of another European philosopher, Slavoj Žižek, have been disappointing given his previous statements on Israel-Palestine. So here I ask, do we condemn Žižek? It is important to recognise that the Slovenian philosopher has been put in a difficult position. After giving a speech at the opening of the Frankfurt Book Fair on October 17, he was viciously attacked and even accused of anti-Semitism. He was even heckled at the event for pointing out that “Palestinians are strictly treated as a problem. The state of Israel doesn’t offer them any hope, positively outlining their role in the state they live.”
Since then, he has spent considerable effort trying to defend himself against being falsely identified as an anti-Semite. But in trying to navigate the genocidally charged environment of Germany and the rest of Europe, Žižek has inadvertently betrayed his radical leftist aspirations. Most of what he said in the speech first appeared in an article he published with Project Syndicate on October 13 under the title “The Real Dividing Line in Israel-Palestine”. In the piece, he writes “the situation demands historical context” but then goes on to reduce “the situation” to a confrontation between “fundamentalists on both sides”; he talks about the Israeli occupation and the “truly desperate and hopeless conditions faced by Palestinians in Gaza and the occupied territories”, but reaffirms Israel’s “right to defend itself”.
Many of his previous writings have been disconnected from and contradicts his previous writings about state terrorism, Zionism, peace, “hamatzav”, the two-state solution, or even the critique of the American invasion of Iraq. While he links the war in Gaza to “the mass of Palestinian Arabs who have been living in a state of limbo for decades”, Žižek fails to bring up the history of the ongoing Nakba and its significance for understanding the extremist Zionist messianic ideology. He also repeats a major talking point from the Israeli hasbara repertoire about Hamas’s role in undermining any possibility for peace, despite previously identifying Israel as the main actor that is undermining peace.