Recognizing the Familiar

On liberalism vs. liberation and Isabella Hammad

But it is not enough to be a liberal, to have the right attitudes and even to give money to the right causes. You have to know more than that. You have to be prepared to risk more than that. –James Baldwin

For The Baffler, David Klion recently wrote the following of liberal Zionism: “If there is one lesson to be taken from the past dismal year, it’s this: The liberal Zionist interpretation of the conflict has no predictive value, no analytical weight, and no moral rigor.” That sentiment, in my view, applies to liberal logic, in general; given that its default – indeed only – lens is that of Western¹ individualism, and that liberalism is bound to capitalism, liberal thought rather quickly reaches the limits of its potential. It does acknowledge our collective, intersecting problems (though typically only after they reach crisis levels²), but can offer only individualistic, atomized solutions. As I wrote recently, “heads you vote, tails you buy”.

Another issue: The lens of liberalism renders the general into the universal. As Max Liboiron argues in Pollution is Colonialism, however, this “universal is never universal, but rather an argument to imperialistically expand a particular worldview as the worldview”. In practice, the way that “we” behave, i.e. dominant cultures in the West, becomes the way that all people behave, or would; the specific instances of European colonialism or American enslavement, for example, become random, unfortunate happenings along the “arc of history” on its way towards justice. 

Perhaps you see the problem here; aside from obscuring the context (chattel slavery in the Americas was a feature of colonial-capitalism, not a bug, and a unique form of enslavement), the logic lies one step away from apologia and – potentially, at least – two or three steps from justification. (There’s a reason Theodor Adorno called liberalism “the handmaiden to fascism”.) 

Moreover, in its attempt to expand Western humanity to include other peoples via universalization, it actually dehumanizes them, by denying or negating their cultures, modes of thought, and ways of life. To provide a light-hearted, personal anecdote, a friend from Pakistan once picked me up in his car; when I got in, he was playing Pakistani music on the stereo. I joked, “Oh, ethnic music!” to which he replied, “Jon, we have a culture!”

The spur for this essay was a newsletter I recently read,³ specifically the following section on Gaza: “And to bring it back to Israel: I do in fact find it highly characteristic of human beings that one of the most hunted and criminalized ethnic/religious groups in history, after nearly being destroyed, was finally dealt out a state of its own by various guilty belligerents after a world war, and proceeded to … reenact its own history on the nearest available set of people. Sounds like the human race, doesn’t it? It’s so us.”

You can see the liberal lens at work here – the blurry understanding of the facts, the universalization. Although the Nakba proper began in 1948, the Zionist colonial project in Palestine goes back further, before World War II and the Holocaust (the Balfour Declaration took place in 1917). As Illan Pappe notes in The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, the settlement of the region was “closely interwoven with nineteenth-century Christian millenarianism and European colonialism”. In that sense, he argues, it relates to other European and British colonial endeavors in the Americas, Africa and Australia – and, like those versions, the Zionist project made use of land theft, ethnic cleansing, cultural erasure (i.e. de-Arabization) and violence. 

In this historical context, then, Israel’s current genocide, as well as its war of territorial expansion, make sense as a continuation of that project – again, a feature, not a bug. Moreover, the English, the French, the Spaniards et al. did not experience a genocide before perpetrating their own; as in those cases, it is the colonial drive for land that explains what the Zionist project has done and is doing, not the impact of the Holocaust.

The attempt at a pat psychology explainer also elides the fact that many Jewish people either did not agree with the Zionist project, were (and are) actively anti-Zionist, or simply had no interest in taking part.⁴ But anyway, stating that settler colonialism is “so us”, well, that’s just a pretty stupid fucking thing to say, frankly. Yes, theft and murder, in big, broad strokes, are endemic to the “human condition” – but so is passing gas.

More broadly though, the argument brings to mind what Anand Giridharadas, in a review of a book by Jared Diamond, calls the “30,000 feet” perspective; that is, a viewpoint from such a height that it eliminates all detail. And, in the case of Gaza, details matter – especially now, when the victims of Western imperialism are screaming at us through our screens; especially now, when our governments are directly involved in their slaughter.

To change course and gain (some) altitude, I want to consider a bigger picture here, and do a little psychologizing of my own. For liberation is not only of interest to me as a political project, but a personal one – that is, as someone in my positionality, in this colonial entity, Canada (well, Quebec, the other, smaller colonial project). 

In Recognizing the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative, Isabella Hammad presents the idea of recognition, i.e. the moment when someone truly sees the humanity of a dehumanized other, as a form of epiphany, one that summons the observer to bear witness to the daily reality of Palestinian life.

I think that, from the positionality of settler in a colonizing project like Canada (or Quebec), we can look at this another way: When we observe the ongoing genocide, we “recognize the familiar”, i.e. we come to understand something about our own country, which is to say we learn something about ourselves. To misquote the Bible,⁵ we see through a glass, clearly; and this can involve psychological distress. On the “human, individual scale”, Hammad notes, these shifts are “humbling and existentially disturbing”.⁶

The liberal response to this puts us on the wrong path: It individualizes our feelings of discomfort, anger and shock – that is to say, legitimate reactions to human suffering – and distorts them into personal “guilt”. Whereas the former might incite us to take collective action (hey John Brown), the latter turns our gaze inwards. In this psychological state, the best we can do is liberal solutionism (reconciliation, land acknowledgements) – or choose denial; for, as Hammad states, “denial is based on a kind of knowing”, a “wilful turning from devastating knowledge, perhaps, out of fear”. 

As it turns out, anticolonial thinking offers us a better approach. In A Third University is Possible, for example, la paperson describes “settler” not as an identity, but as the “idealized judicial space of exceptional rights granted to normative settler citizens”. He makes clear that “not all settlers at all times enjoy the full privileges” of that positionality; instead, “settler supremacy is constructed and maintained by a number of technologies: citizenship, private property, civic and criminal innocence, normative setter sexuality, and so on.”

As opposed to an individual (i.e. liberal), identity-political framework, this technological analysis “allows us to see the ‘how’ and the ‘who next’ rather than just the ‘who’ of settler colonialism.” In this way, la paperson concludes, it “describes what power wants, not who you are.”

Unlike liberalism, this paradigm offers not only analytical and explanatory force – you cannot “fight the power” if you do not understand it – but liberatory potential, as well. Individuals can understand their privilege not as a form of Original Sin, but rather as sites of potential for unlearning and relearning, for in-group education and advocacy, for out-group collaboration and resistance. And coalition-building: For, as Judith Butler argues in Who’s Afraid of Gender?, we need “new coalitions and new imaginaries,” based in uneasy solidarity, to “meet the challenges of authoritarian structures and fascist passions”. 

In the end, this much is certain: Humans have organized their societies in all manner of ways, throughout history and in the present; it is only one particular form of organization, i.e. globalized, industrial colonial-capitalism, that has filled the planet with plastic, created the biodiversity crisis, and reengineered the climate. It is that same form of organization, via its imperialistic tendencies, that drives multiple, ongoing conflicts and genocides – and threatens nuclear armageddon, by the way (as if you didn’t have enough on your mind). 

All that to say: it’s liberation, or bust – and letting go of liberalism and its individualistic bias is the first step.

1. I’m using “Western” here for lack of a better term, and specifically mean imperialistic Western individualism. I say this as sometimes the term “Western” can elide the existence of indigenous peoples in North America and Europe, as well as forms of resistance in the West, in general.

2. Consider how, in the US, liberal, mainstream media has only recently embraced the term “fascism”; writers, journalists and and academics have considered the threat of authoritarianism for years (e.g. Chris Hedges wrote American Fascists in 2007).

3. I’m not mentioning the writer or linking the newsletter; my intention is not to score points, but make them.

4.  “The Balfour Declaration became a highly controversial document. It disturbed those Jewish circles who were not in favour of the Zionist aim of the creation of a Jewish State [...] Many Jewish communities of non-Zionist convictions regarded themselves as nationals of their countries, and the concept of a “Jewish national home” created strong conflicts of loyalties [...] Foremost among Jewish critics was Sir Edwin Montagu, Secretary of State for India and the only Jewish member of the British Cabinet.” (Source.)

5. 1 Corinthians 13:12: “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.”

6. In the conclusion to The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Ilan Pappe describes this phenomenon as follows: “For Israelis, to recognise the Palestinians as victims is deeply distressing, in at least two ways. As this form of acknowledgement means facing up to the historical injustice in which Israel is incriminated through the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948, it calls into question the very foundational myths of the State of Israel, and it raises a host of questions that have inescapable implications for the future of the state.”