A Stupid Cartoon and the University Ideology
Among the thousand currents of the university turmoil during these last several months, the tiny ripple that most securely caught my eye was a distinctly minor scandal at Harvard back in February, which caused not a single broken window or student riot or mass invasion by agents of the state. This was a scandal over a cartoon. The minor scandal had the virtue, however, of casting a retrospective light on an earlier scandal at Harvard, the original scandal, which was pretty much the founding moment of what eventually became the enormous tide of university protests and controversies.
The original scandal was a statement signed by more than thirty Harvard student groups in the first days after the October 7, 2023 massacre blaming Israel (“entirely responsible”) instead of Hamas (unmentioned) for the atrocities — after which came the clumsy dithering of Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay, to speak up in a sufficiently articulate fashion about the massacre and the student statement, which led to her notorious failure in testimony to Congress to find anything condemnatory to say about students calling for genocide of the Jews (“depends on context”), which led to everything else. And this was not just in America. In Paris, Sciences Po, aka the Institut d’études de politiques de Paris, which is more or less the Harvard of France, generated its own scandal, beginning in March. The Sciences Po students held a pro-Palestine meeting. A Jewish student got up the courage to enter the amphitheater. And the Jewish student was greeted in a manner that was sufficiently obnoxious to attract the attention of Emmanuel Macron himself, who thought it his duty to underline the “unspeakable and perfectly intolerable” behavior — which led, by late April, to a student occupation of a stairwell, the intervention of riot police, indignation over the menace to academic freedom, and generally the turmoil that any number of universities and arts organizations have come to know. In this fashion, the enormous and sometimes scandalous wave of protests against Israel and Zionism that got started at Harvard has turned out to be, well, maybe not universal. Problems and protests like these seem not to have occurred in the Latin American universities, which is curious. Nor in various other regions. But the wave has been very large. The cartoon scandal — the mini-event at Harvard in February — was brought on by two student organizations, the Harvard Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee and the African and African American Resistance Organization, with the unfortunate support of still another organization called Harvard Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine. The two student groups set out to show and acclaim the historical origins of African–American solidarity with the Palestinian cause. This reaches back to 1967 and the rebellious young activists of the civil rights movement. The Harvard student groups wanted to explain that, in adopting the Palestinian cause, the young rebels of those long-ago times took a major step in advancing the larger struggle for black liberation. The students composed an infographic making those points, and the graphic within the infographic was a charcoal-line cartoon by an artist named Herman “Kofi” Bailey, which the students lifted from the young rebels’ newsletter from 1967.
The cartoon showed blacks and Arabs being jointly oppressed by their enemy, the Jews. A black man and an Arab man (who might have been Muhammad Ali, the boxer, and Gamal Abdel Nasser, the president of Egypt) gazed helplessly upward from the cartoon with nooses draped around their necks. At the top of the cartoon a white hand, bearing on its back a Star of David tattoo encasing a dollar sign, held the two nooses loosely in its fingers, ready to give the fatal yank. But salvation was in sight. This was a scrawny arm brandishing a machete, with the arm and machete labeled “Third World Liberation Movement,” ready to slice the ropes and liberate the doomed. The cartoon was, in short, a melodrama of victimhood (blacks, Arabs), victimizer (Jews), and savior (Third World Liberation). The Harvard student groups saw sufficient value in the cartoon to post it on their Instagram site. Someone at the Harvard Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine was sufficiently impressed to repost it, signaling approval (even if, in reality, the faculty-and-staff group had no idea what was being reposted). And the mini-scandal was at hand.
On this occasion, Harvard’s new interim president — Claudine Gay was gone by then — demonstrated that he had learned from Gay’s mistakes and was quick to condemn. And the dean of Harvard College, Rakesh Khurana, did the interim president one better. Dean Khurana called the Instagram post “unmistakably anti-Semitic and racist,” which was a sharp phrase, given that, at Harvard, the two student groups surely regarded themselves as racism’s boldest enemies. And the phrase was doubly sharp, given that Harvard Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine had made a point, in their founding statement, of disputing the claim that “critique of the Israeli state is anti-Semitic.” Their own critique of the Israeli state turned out, however, to be anti-Semitic. Said the dean: “It’s become clear that some members of our community are intent on testing the limits of how low discourse can go — and it now appears that we are hitting rock bottom.”
Everyone apologized. Harvard is civilized. And yet, no one likes to be insulted. And the people under accusation by their dean may have felt that, even if they had failed to examine their cartoon closely enough, the general opinion among students at Harvard, and among a good many faculty as well, was on their side. Harvard Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine accordingly lamented their participation in the affair with a fine panache of the passive tense: “It has come to our attention that a post featuring antiquated cartoons which used offensive anti-Semitic tropes was linked to our account.”
The student apologies ventured still further into the zones of passive aggression. The student groups expunged the disgraced cartoon from their Instagram post. But they replaced the cartoon with a photo of the leader of the young rebels whose newsletter, back in 1967, had originally published it. This was Stokely Carmichael, in later years known as Kwame Ture, a charismatic man whose most famous slogan was the stirring “Black Power,” but whose second most famous slogan (famous, at least, within the corner of the public that was singled out for death) was the off-hand snarl, “The only good Zionist is a dead Zionist.”
The aspect that catches my eye now was how ghostly the scandalous element turned out to be, as if haunted by the truly original scandal, not the one at Harvard immediately after October 7, but the original’s original, which was in 1967. The rebellious young people in 1967 were members of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC, pronounced “snick.” In the period leading up to 1967, SNCC was — if I may put it this way — the most glorious student organization that has ever existed. Martin Luther King, Jr. and a solid bloc of experienced stalwarts were the commanders of the civil rights movement in its adult division, and the young people in SNCC, who were black and white alike, were the human-wave foot-soldiers, marching across the South to undergo arrests and beatings and ultimately achieve victory. Young John Lewis in Atlanta was SNCC’s chairman. In South Carolina, young James Clyburn was among the SNCC stalwarts. In New York, SNCC’s high school division mobilized the youth of the youth.
By 1965, though, Stokely Carmichael and his fellow-thinkers were beginning to take over the organization. They succeeded in expelling the whites, which tended to mean the Jews. By 1967, young Lewis had left the organization. Carmichael inherited the chairmanship. The Six Day War broke out in the Middle East. In the Arab countries, the shock at seeing so many Arab armies defeated so quickly and ignominiously by Israel set off a political earthquake, which meant radicalization, a major event across the region. The Palestinian terrorist campaigns got underway. And the war set off an additional earthquake in the American civil rights movement. The new team at SNCC rebelled against the civil rights old guard and its many alliances, above all the alliance with the American Jews. And the SNCC newsletter ran an article making the case against Zionism.
It was a ferocious case. Zionism in SNCC’s portrayal was ugliness itself. Zionism was racist even against darker-skinned Jews. It was exploitative of black Africa, hostile to African liberation, and Nazi-like against the Palestinians in Gaza. Zionism was a creature of British and American imperialism. Zionism’s purpose was to help white America exploit Arab oil. Zionism was a product, finally, of a Rothschild “conspiracy with the British” — the Rothschilds, who, in capital letters, “CONTROL MUCH OF AFRICA’S MINERAL WEALTH.” The noose cartoon faithfully illustrated the article. And the spirit of that article and its cartoon became a trend, visible in SNCC and in the brand new Black Panther Party, too, which went on to publish its own cartoons on similar themes.
Those were big developments, which perhaps could be presented, as the Harvard students and their faculty supporters did a few months ago in their infographic, as contributions to a “heightened awareness” within the black struggle for liberation. But it also could be argued that, all in all, the young people’s anti-Zionist rebellion in SNCC in 1967, together with the rise of the Black Panthers, pretty much blew up the national political coalition that King and Rustin and the old-school civil rights leaders had so brilliantly put together. The blow-up took place at a crucial moment, too, just when, under Rustin’s inspiration, King was taking early steps to bring about a basic transformation of the civil rights movement.
The historic movement was a campaign for legal rights. By 1967, though, the major specific demands of the historic movement had made their way into law, voted by Congress and signed by Lyndon Johnson. But Rustin had come up with a new idea, which was to convert the movement for legal equality into a campaign for economic equality. The idea was to expand the civil rights coalition into an immense multi-racial campaign for social democratic reform, under the command of the old civil rights leadership, which meant King himself and his circle. This was a proposal to move United States social policy significantly to the left, in the European style, with the collusion of the Johnson administration. Only, the entire universe conspired against Rustin and King and this very ambitious project.
It wasn’t just the young radicals in SNCC, together with their comrades in the Black Panther Party and everyone who admired SNCC and the Panthers, which was a lot of people. The social-democratic trade unions — the historically Jewish garment unions, that is, plus the Auto Workers — maintained their own youth auxiliary, which was the mostly white Students for a Democratic Society, or SDS, who took pride in being SNCC’s loyal allies. And the young white hotheads of SDS and their own friends among the hippies and “freaks” were already doing their own bit to blow up the old coalition, though not generally in the name of anti-Zionism or hating the Jews. In truth, not everybody did hate Zionism and the Jews. But everyone hated the older generation — everyone in the left-wing and activist youth movements, that is, except for a few. It was rough on the fifty-year-olds. Rustin’s vast social democratic project depended, in any case, on King and his charisma, and the assassination in Memphis, which was in April 1968, brought the project pretty much to an end. And Richard Nixon was elected president. And Stokely Carmichael departed for a new life in Africa.
SNCC’s turn toward anti-Zionism has always seemed a little puzzling, and that is because of Carmichael himself. Carmichael was born in the West Indies, but he came of age in the Bronx, New York, where Jews were not an exotic species. At the Bronx High School of Science, which he attended, the scions of the Jewish Bronx crowded the corridors, and none of those students were Rothschilds, and various of them came from backgrounds not lacking in enthusiasm for King and the civil rights movement. Todd Gitlin was one year behind Carmichael at Bronx Science — Gitlin, who went on to Harvard, where he became a national leader of Students for a Democratic Society. Harvard expressed an interest in Carmichael, too, and offered him a scholarship. Carmichael preferred to go to Howard University in Washington, the most distinguished of the black colleges.
And yet, at Howard one of his more significant friends appears to have been Tom Kahn, who was yet another socialist from a Jewish family, in this instance from Brooklyn. It was young Kahn who brought Carmichael into the circle around Rustin — Kahn, who went from Max Shachtman’s famously clever socialist faction to strategizing for Rustin, and from there to strategizing for the AFL-CIO. How, then, could someone like Carmichael, with any number of friends and comrades from the world of Jewish support for the black cause, have made his way to “rock bottom,” in the Harvard dean’s phrase, amid the ancient superstitions and the belief that African-America’s oppressor was international Jewry? The descent into that sort of thing can make people wonder if some terrible incident didn’t drive him to a crude response — a knavish landlord, a nasty math teacher, a catty high school clique, or who knows?
But those are silly speculations. Carmichael was a serious man, and his evolution was a matter of serious reflection — a matter of intellectual sophistication, in some degree, and not a lack of it. The classic civil-rights idea, in Rustin’s version, was itself a mighty sophistication. It was an internationalism, with inspirations drawn from India’s anticolonial rebellion and the non-violent philosophy of Mahatma Gandhi, mixed with support for the anticolonial campaigns of black Africa, which Rustin deftly mixed with still more inspirations drawn from multiple currents of American Protestantism and the African-American tradition, and still more inspirations from the social-democratic wing of the labor movement and their Shachtmanite advisors, together with the particular corner of American liberal reformism that tended to be Jewish. That was a fabulous concoction. But those were ideas from the 1940s and 1950s.
Young Carmichael was a man of the 1960s. He drew his own inspiration from Frantz Fanon, the philosopher of decolonization, who was a psychiatrist from Martinique — and Fanon’s ideas seem to me key in this development. Fanon was angrier than Rustin, and bitter — which accounted for his appeal to a younger generation. And he was an ambitious thinker. His ideas unfolded in phases. Initially his project was to sharpen and affirm a black consciousness adapted to the mid-twentieth century — a trans-national black consciousness, suited to his own French Caribbean, to the blacks of France, to various regions of West Africa, and even to the blacks of the United States. He became active in the Algerian struggle against France, and he extended his purpose to speak on behalf of revolutionary Arabs as well, though I am not sure that his insights into Arab consciousness amounted to much. He broadened his purpose still again to animate and illuminate what he considered to be a worldwide program of anti-colonial revolution and post-colonial development — which mostly that meant the black and Arab worlds, with side glances at other corners of the globe, sufficient to suggest the universality of his ambition.
Ultimately his goal was to help the whole of humanity achieve a full and undeceived self-awareness. This is the self-awareness that is made possible, at last, by a human recognition from others. He wanted to promote a self-aware-ness of this sort among blacks internationally, and among broader populations of color, and then universally. He was, in sum, an unapologetic Hegelian, and, given his background in Martinique, this gave him an undeniable power, analytically and emotionally. Hegel was, after all, the philosopher who stipulated that slavery and the struggle against it are the starting point of all of history — which might sound like a philosophical metaphor to people in other parts of the world, but was actually the case in the Caribbean.
C. L. R. James, the Trinidadian intellectual, was Fanon’s predecessor in thinking along those lines. James wrote a history of the Haitian slave revolution, The Black Jacobins, in 1938, which was also a contemplation of the African decolonization movement, and, in doing this, he, too, gazed on events through a lens of Caribbean Hegelianism. Only, James’s Hegelianism was Marxist. He converted Hegel’s abstract categories — the Master, the Slave — into concrete realities of class struggle, where the traits and interests of one class might intermingle with traits and interests of the other class. James’s anger at slavery was volcanic, but his Marxism allowed him, even so, to identify ways in which the Haitian slaves, who had every reason to hate the French, were able to borrow ideas and ideals from France. And the slaves were able to benefit, if only fitfully, from the solidarity of France’s revolutionaries, and were able even to offer a solidarity of their own to France’s revolution, quite as if the struggle, which was deadly, contained within it a negotiation. And the negotiation pointed to a possible better future — which made for an angry book that was also a subtle book.
Fanon’s Hegelianism, though, was not a Marxism — not in his early book Black Skins, White Masks, and not in his more famous The Wretched of the Earth, in 1961 (even if the title is a line from the revolutionary anthem The Internationale). Fanon recognized the reality of economic conflicts and struggles. But his vision of the world emphasized, instead, conflicts that were psychological, or perhaps cultural. He recognized the existence of social and economic classes, but his vision of the world emphasized the clash of entire nations against one another, instead of social classes. These were the colonized nations against the colonizing nations, and their struggle was the global struggle of the Third World against the European empires (and the second Europe that is the United States). Sometimes he spoke of entire races, and not just of nations. In a number of rhapsodic passages here and there, he spoke of a higher synthesis emerging from the worldwide conflicts. But mostly he pictured a struggle that was going to lead to a victory for the colonized and a defeat for the colonizers, or the opposite, without any intermingling of traits that might contain within it a hidden negotiation, and without much prospect for a higher synthesis, except in the vaguest of ways.
Fanon was not, on these points, a proper Hegelian, which he punctiliously acknowledged. His vision of the struggle was blunter than Hegel’s, and blunter than James’s, and the bluntness led to a strictly violent concept of the struggle. He considered that violence was unavoidable for the oppressed. And he considered that, in some respects, violence was positively good. In his view, power relations defined identity, such that the oppressed were defined by their oppression, and not by any cultural or religious wealth that might be their own. (That is why, in The Wretched of the Earth, the various colonized nations are indistinguishable, one from another, since all of them are victims of the same colonialist oppression.) And since the oppressed are defined by their oppression, the only way for them to assert a new and better identity and resolve their psychological problems is through an exercise of force, which means violence. Gandhi and the Gandhians and their American civil-rights emulators considered that non-violence was a tactic which was also a principle. In their eyes, non-violence conferred meaning. But Fanon looked on violence as a tactic which was also a principle. It was violence that conferred meaning. Violence was therapy for the colonized. Violence allowed oppressed people to become fully human, or “men.”
In his recent biography of Fanon, The Rebel’s Clinic, Adam Shatz offers a satisfyingly intelligent and thorough account of the man, and argues that Fanon has been subject to a lot of unfair criticism on the violence question. “The violence of the colonized,” in Fanon’s interpretation, as Shatz explains it, “was a counter-violence.” The imperialists were to blame, not the enemies of imperialism. This explanation may not survive a reading of The Wretched of the Earth. Something is alarming in Fanon’s odes to the violence of the oppressed: “At the individual level, violence is a cleansing force. It rids the colonized of their inferiority complex, of their passive and despairing attitude. It emboldens them, and restores their confidence,” and so forth. Violence makes Fanon sit upright in his chair. He is electrified. He was, in this respect (and in other respects), a true disciple of Sartre, who spent a lot of time sitting upright in his own chair, excited at the prospect of open conflict. Or Fanon ended up looking like Georges Sorel, the syndicalist — Sorel, the author of a once-famous book called Reflections on Violence, whose revolutionary doctrine rested on the direct- action anarchists of the 1890s, and found encouragement in the violence of the frightening lumpenproletariat, and hinted at the fascists of the years to come.
You could be excused for wondering if the nationalism- violence-and-lumpen combination in Fanon’s imagination likewise didn’t flirt with extreme-right possibilities — though Fanon was plainly more a man of moods than someone with an extremist vocation. And, in scattered passages of The Wretched of the Earth, his better judgment allowed him, as his biographer correctly observes, to grant that violence was not, in fact, an ideal, and could even be a big mistake, tactically speaking. And Fanon was eloquent, finally, on the meaning of freedom. But this meant only that, on a series of fundamental questions — violence, the nation — Fanon was ambiguous.
His emotional force, though, his power of condemnation, which was a power that comes from being frank — this was not ambiguous. The anger in him and even the ambiguities seemed to speak for vast percentages of the human race — the vast percentages that were in the course of throwing off the European empires and trying to construct a new world system. The man himself was appealing, with his enthusiasm for ideas and his effort to get at the real psychology of people, and this made it easy to overlook his infelicities of one sort or another. If he contradicted himself, which he did almost systematically, this, too, was not without appeal. He was a man in a hurry because world events were in a hurry, and there was no time to straighten out every little contradiction. Besides, he was immensely self-confident, and self-confidence made him glamorous.
His glamour was rendered official, too, by an endorsement from Sartre himself — Sartre who, in the 1960s, floated on a sea of worldwide prestige. Sartre endorsed him by writing a wild preface to The Wretched of the Earth, more violent even than Fanon himself: “Murderous rampage is the collective unconscious of the colonized….” And on every continent, the hippest-of-the-hip in the 1960s, who were the young, understood intuitively that Fanon’s ideas and even his excesses were the spirit of what was, in fact, a revolutionary age. Wasn’t that Stokely Carmichael’s experience? I am sure that it was. I imagine Carmichael turning Fanon’s pages and saying to himself, “Yes, that is me he is talking about. And the world he describes is the world that actually exists.”
I imagine this because, in a fashion that could hardly be more different, that was my own experience. My copy of The Wretched of the Earth — the copy on my table right now — is a $1.25 paper-back, which I purchased in 1969. The faded yellow magic marker lines running through its pages remind me how earnestly I studied it. I did that at Columbia College in the spring semester of 1969, under the guidance of my professor, Edward Said, who himself was still in a stage of voraciously absorbing influences from Fanon and the French philosophers. I took from my reading that Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth offered a schema, which was neither liberal nor Communist, for analyzing every conceivable thing. The violent passages — there were many — alarmed me not at all. “For the colonized, life can only materialize from the rotting cadaver of the colonist,” wrote Fanon, and the rotting cadaver seemed to me, from my stand-point at the age of nineteen, creepy with energy, which made it marvelous. I, too, believed that Fanon spoke for vast portions of the previously silent or silenced human race.
Only, I found myself wondering about the many populations that might not fit into a simple tabulation of the colonized and the colonizers. Not everybody does fit into those two categories, after all, or into any two categories.
The Jews, for instance — where did they fit? I wasn’t much concerned with Jewish issues, but, still, as I bent to the task of drawing yellow lines, I did wonder. And I wondered again as I faithfully attended a campus teach-in, at the urging of my professor, in order to learn about the secularist and progressive ideals of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, who were represented to me as the true exponents of Fanon’s philosophy, but whose secularist and progressive ideals left me uneasy — as if a little voice whispered in my ear that, fifty-four years later, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine was going to participate, as it did, in the October 7 massacre. So I responded with excitement to Fanon, and also grew reserved. Now, Fanon himself, it must be said, did give some thought to Jewish questions. He ruminated over the psychological situation of the Jews, perhaps more than he ever did over the psychological situation of the Arabs — though mostly he did this in reference to his study of psychological circumstances among the blacks, which was his chief concern. His thoughts were sympathetic. In Black Skins, White Masks, he made clear that nothing in his sympathy for the Jews and their plight was begrudging: “Anti-Semitism hits me head-on: I am enraged, I am bled white by an appalling battle, I am deprived of the possibility of being a man, I cannot dissociate myself from the future that is proposed for my brother.” He understood that hatred of Jews and hatred of blacks tallied up, in the last analysis, to the same sum. “It was my philosophy professor, a native of the Antilles, who recalled the fact to me: ‘Whenever you hear anyone abuse the Jews, pay attention, because he is talking about you.’” Or, in other words: “an anti-Semite is invariably anti-Negro.”
He drew up comparative observations on the oppressive prejudices that descend variously upon Jews and blacks, and on Jewish and black psychological reactions. He was tolerant and charitable. He proposed a diagnosis of a Jewish psychiatric patient who, in “a fine example of a reactional phenomenon,” angrily and pathetically sided with the anti-Semites. “In order to react against anti-Semitism,” Fanon explained, “the Jew turns himself into an anti-Semite” (with the acuity of this diagnosis revealed by the fitness of his present tense).
But Black Skin, White Masks is not so widely read. In The Wretched of the Earth, he occupied himself with other matters. But even there he paused to note, if only in passing, that Germany was paying reparations to Israel, which he seemed to approve. And his approval left no doubt that his approval extended to Israel as well, even if he did not spell out his approval explicitly. Does this seem surprising? I suppose that, in the atmosphere of our own moment, Fanon’s evident sympathy for the Zionist project might, in fact, seem surprising.
But it should be remembered that, in 1961, when The Wretched of the Earth came out, an approving view of Israel was entirely normal and natural among intellectuals of the traditional left. Israel was, after all, a refugee state, and everyone on the traditional left did understand this. Israel was filled with people who, in Fanon’s phrase, “were forced to leave” other countries, and who, in their new country, which was also their ancestral homeland, were trying to avoid getting massacred — which made the Israelis objects of sympathy as a matter of left-wing instinct. The concept that a nation of refugees ought to be regarded as an imperialist imposition, soon to be erased (“the world’s last settler-colonial state,” as Adam Shatz confidently puts it in his Fanon biography), had not yet taken hold. Fanon made clear that he expected Israel to endure: he speculated about a new collective unconscious emerging among the Jews, after a hundred years of Israeli existence. And then, at the age of thirty-six, he succumbed to leukemia, and there was no opportunity to work up further thoughts on Jewish or Zionist themes.
Fanon’s very early death was a tragedy in a dozen ways, but one of those ways, I think, touches precisely on those themes. A man with his acuities and philosophical breadth, and his recognition of Jewish suffering and its complexities, might have been able to explain Israel to the Arabs in a fashion that no one else has been able to do — or so I like to imagine. He could have made clear that Jews fleeing to Israel from places like Algeria were not the equivalent of people from France deciding to become settler-colonists in Algeria. He could at least have pointed out a few realities along those lines to the American professors who pride themselves as experts on oppression. Perhaps he could have explained a few things to the Jews, too, in his role as kindly psychiatrist.
Then again, in connection to Zionism, his early death might have been a tragedy also for the blacks of Africa and maybe in other parts of the world. He wanted to affirm a lucid black consciousness, wanted to define a distinctly black perspective, which meant that he wanted to cast off the white insistence on imposing white definitions on everything touching on blacks. His finest pages explored those themes. And, in connection to controversies over Zionism, there was an obvious point to make — obvious, I would think, to someone like him, who, in drawing up his analysis, paid careful attention to an additional sophistication that was Sartre’s. This was a sophistication in regard to dishonesty. Sartre fixated on what he called “bad faith,” which was a great theme of Sartre’s, maybe his greatest theme of all — a grand theme, at least, in Being and Nothingness, which Fanon made a point of invoking. “Bad faith” meant the particular mendacity of someone who knows the truth, but does not like the truth, and therefore prefers to lie about it, and lies about having lied. And it is the mendacity of someone who may even convince himself that his lies are truths, and his lies about lying are likewise truths — even while knowing that lies are lies. Bad faith, in short, is a twisted consciousness.
The black perspective, then, in regard to Zionism — what was it?
What should it have been? In recent decades, the black liberation struggle has acquired a worldwide prestige that Fanon could only have fantasized about. The black struggle has become the modern ideal of a righteous struggle for a better world. And in the context of this development, the anti-Zionist movement, beginning in a small way in the 1960s, and continuing in a large way in the years after 2000, has taken to arguing that, in the modern age, Zionism ought to be seen not as one more liberation struggle, but as the enemy of liberation struggles. Zionism ought to be seen as a participant in the white supremacist and colonialist movements that oppressed blacks in the past. Zionism ought to be seen not as an enemy of Nazism and its systematic exterminations, but as a counterpart to Nazism. And anti-Zionism, by contrast, ought be seen as the heir and brother of the black struggle. Or better still, anti-Zionism ought to be seen as indistinguishable from the black struggle, given that Zionism is white supremacism itself. The success of this argument has been, of course, extraordinary in different parts of the world, which is why on various continents the anti-Zionist cause has acquired the supreme moral prestige of our moment, not just in the universities.
But someone with an orientation like Fanon’s can only notice that, amid the worldwide din on behalf of the anti-Zionist cause, the actual black liberation struggle — the struggle by actual black people, that is — has once again, exactly as in the past, been drowned out by non-black voices. And everyone knows this to be true, and pretends not to know, in a classic display of Sartrean bad faith. The largest ethnic horror of the last several months has taken place, after all, within the Arab world, but not in the poor stricken corner of it that is Gaza. The ethnic horror has been the sustained assault on the Masalit people of Sudan, who are black, conducted by the predominantly Arab forces in Sudan’s renewed civil war, with disastrous consequences for the blacks, measured in deaths (Le Monde has put the figure at something like 75,000 in the last several months), and rapes, and a refugee crisis consisting of eight million people, and a dire food shortage for some eighteen million people. I say that everyone knows this because these events do get reported, not just in obscure human rights publications.
But the anti-Zionists have succeeded in commandeering the language of black liberation, and they have used the language to drown out the actual blacks who are suffering. To drown out the cries of victims in other parts of the world has been a main function of the anti-Zionist movement for many years now. This point was elegantly made as long ago as 2001 by Bernard-Henri Lévy in an essay called Les Damnés de la guerre, or The Wretched of the War, which invoked Fanon in its title. (Lévy’s Les Damnés de la guerre rhymes with Fanon’s Les Damnés de la terre — though Lévy’s rhyme disappeared in the English translation, and along with it the invocation of Fanon.) But who will make that point about anti-Zionism today? Anti-Zionism as an instance of what used to be called “false consciousness”? And who will point out that, by contrast, a function of Zionism itself — when Zionism is healthy — is to raise a cry on behalf of the tiny nations, instead of the enormous nations: the little populations that, like the Zionist nation itself, are surrounded by enormous hostile states and populations?
So the voices of the Masalit people go unheard by everyone around the world (even though everyone does, in fact, hear), except the specialists in human rights and a handful of reporters. At Columbia University just now, as I am writing, the student uprising is led by the group called Columbia University Apartheid Divest, with reference to the white supremacist social system of not-so-long ago in South Africa — quite as if the uprising at Columbia amounted to an uprising in favor of oppressed blacks resisting racism in Africa.
But the Columbia uprising merely claims to have done so, with its invocation of apartheid — oh, perhaps with a perfunctory nod to Sudan now and then, in passing. A main student leader of Columbia University Apartheid Divest has become famous, instead, for saying, “Be grateful that I’m not just going out and murdering Zionists” — which is not, after all, a bizarre thing to say, since it merely reprises Stokely Carmichael. And it reprises the Hamas charter. But since everyone by now has read the charter, everyone ought to know, as well, even if they do not know, that in Article Thirty-Four and elsewhere the charter calls for slavery, too. Perhaps that deserves a comment, too? But no one is going to ruminate over Islamist fundamentalism and the history of Arab marauders attacking African blacks.
Mightn’t those be Fanon’s observations, if he were alive? — the observations that reflect a black bitterness, alert to the layers of falsity that bear the stamp of bad faith? But I do not pretend to know. I am not Fanon. And I am not an oppressed Sudanese. But I am definitely sorry that he is gone.
Fanon’s died in 1961, the same year as the publication of The Wretched of the Earth. His outpouring of acute moral observations and psychoanalytic complications and simple and too-simple angers and political analyses reached its end. And, under those circumstances, his readers were bound to succumb to the allure of his sharp division of world affairs into a conflict between the good nations and the bad nations. And his readers were bound to succumb to that idea without regard to what anyone’s ideas and intentions might be, on the assumption, which was his, that identity is conferred by power relations, and not by what people actually think and believe.
The Algerian Revolution figured within the larger Arabist movement, which, in its struggle against the French and British empires, could only be seen, from Fanon’s simple standpoint, as the last word in progressivism. But the Arabists also nursed an absolute hostility to Zionism, which suggested that absolute hostility to Zionism must be, by definition, likewise a progressive sentiment. Everyone who thought along the lines of good nations versus bad nations was likely to reach that conclusion. And everyone was likely to set aside as irrelevant the ideas and intentions of the Arabist movement in regard to Zionism and the Jews.
But what if ideas and intentions do, in fact, matter? What if Fanon’s habit of excluding ideas and goals from his analyses was bound to produce a systematic blind spot? The grand French philosophers could never make up their minds on this question — on whether ideas matter. Or should every struggle around the world be judged simply on the basis of who appears to be down and who, up? Sartre was a model of confusion on these matters. His sympathy for the downtrodden led him to line up on the Algerian side against the French, and likewise to line up on the Palestinian side against the Zionists. He did so with a lot of vehemence, too, such that, having applauded random violence against the French in Algeria, he went on to applaud Palestinian violence against random Israelis, too — Israeli athletes, for example. He thought hostility was justified, and he did not worry about how the hostility was expressed, so long as it was, in fact, expressed, and the more ferociously, the better. He, too, thought that violence has meaning. This made him an exciting thinker, of course. He took ruthlessness to be the sign of honesty, and he was the philosopher of honesty.
Then again, it ought to be obvious that Sartre went a little crazy in these ways. Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks speculated about a syndrome that he called, drawing on the psychoanalytic literature, a “Manichaeanism delirium.” This meant a delirium based on the Manichaean idea that everything in the cosmos reflects a battle between Good and Evil, in eternal conflict. In Sartre’s case, surely it was a Manichaeanism delirium that led to his repeated impulse to applaud murderous violence against people whose guilt, if they were guilty, was merely a matter of extrapolation or second-order imputation.
And yet, Sartre did live through the Nazi era and the German occupation, and though his knowledge of Jewish life was minimal, he drew the requisite conclusions. He had no trouble recognizing that anti-Semitism’s victims were one more downtrodden population. And, though he would never have put it in these words, Zionism was the downtrodden’s obvious resort. So he roused himself from his delirium sufficiently, at least, to sympathize with Israel, after all. In 1967, when the Six Day War broke out and Israel’s survival appeared to be at risk, he put his prestige on Israel’s side. It was a choice. He was reluctant to make the choice. He wobbled. He had to be pushed. Still, he did it — which might seem impossible, given his preference for the Palestinians and his deliriums. But vacillation is conscience, sometimes. And conscience, too, is honesty. And Sartre did not mind looking foolish, so long as he was authentic, or, at least, looked authentic.
Fanon’s widow was furious when she heard that Sartre had chosen to stand with Israel. But when I look back on Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks and its impassioned pages about solidarity with the Jews and hostility to anti-Semitism, I find it easy to imagine that Fanon himself, if he had lived, would have thought hard about Sartre and his choice. I can even imagine that, gathering his courage, Fanon might have joined Sartre in his waverings, perhaps in recognition that he, too, had succumbed for long periods at a time to a Manichaeanism delirium, all too visibly in whole portions of The Wretched of the Earth. And he ought to pull himself together. Fanon’s biographer, Shatz, gives this possibility a thought and declares it “unlikely.” But I wonder if Shatz, for all his admiration of Fanon, hasn’t underserved him in certain ways, mostly by underplaying how seriously he took his engagement with Jewish themes and how closely his instincts meshed with Sartre’s.
Sartre’s waverings, in any case, set a pattern. Michel Foucault followed that pattern a few years later. Foucault watched the Iranian masses overthrow the tyrannical Shah. That was in 1978 and 1979. Foucault watched the Islamist mullahs come to power. And he was ecstatic. He considered that Iran’s revolution was an outbreak of freedom, which led him to spend some time in Iran, relishing the joys. But the time he spent there led him to discover that Iran’s outbreak of freedom was actually a festival of ideology, and the ideology was anti-Semitic. Iran’s revolution against tyranny was an outbreak of tyrannous bigotry. Which Foucault found repulsive. And the ideas and intentions that people cultivate do matter, and what may appear at first glance to be progressive may turn out to be, at second glance, not so progressive. Such were, in any event, the repeated shaky conclusions of the wobbling French philosophers — not all of them, but perhaps the greatest of them, whose wobblings might be the very thing that rescued them from the temptation of philosophy, which is rigidity. A consistent philosopher is, after all, a madman.
And in America? Stokely Carmichael, the sophisticated young champion of Black Power, took his own view of these matters. His instinct was to accept the national-identity vision of worldwide struggle, and not to engage in any wavering of his own. So he accepted Arab nationalism’s absolute hostility to Zionism, and he preferred not to fret over any contradictory aspects or complexities that might have crept into the hostility. This required, of course, a willful blindness on his part. The accusation against Zionism — the real-life accusation, and not just the philosophical ideal of an accusation — was a layered affair, and contradictory aspects and complexities did creep into some of those layers, and they did so from the start.
Is it inappropriate for me to note what those layers were? On the surface, the anti-Zionist accusation was a local accusation about land, which was easy to understand. At a deeper layer, it was a more grandly scaled accusation about imperialist colonization, which could seem accurate, if you viewed it from one angle, or maliciously distorted, if you viewed it from another angle. There was a still deeper layer to the anti-Zionist accusation, the bottom-most substratum, which was theological. This is what you can see in the Hamas charter. It was an accusation against the Jews drawn from ancient Islamic texts, as interpreted by the grandees of the Muslim Brotherhood and the modern Islamist movement, who made clear that Judaism was a plot against the Prophet Muhammad and the whole of Islam. A cosmic crime.
The accusation drew on a German influence from the later 1930s and the early 1940s. This, too, you can see in the Hamas charter, with its scrupulous invocation of the mother- document of modern European insanity about the Jews, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, respectfully cited as if The Protocols were one more revered and ancient Islamic text, which they are not. The Protocols are a compendium of nineteenth-century European fantasies about Jewish conspiracies, which were published as a hoax in Russia in 1903 and went on to enjoy a spectacular success on the extreme right.
Adolf Hitler invoked The Protocols in his own charter, which was Mein Kampf. The German government during the Hitler era distributed The Protocols in Arabic and other languages in the Middle East, where they enjoyed still more success because they appeared to confirm and modernize the many imprecations against the Jews in the ancient Islamic texts. The accusation against Zionism, then, managed to compile in layers the reasonable and the absurd, the progressive and the appalling, the Middle Eastern and the European, the ancient and the modern, all squeezed together into a sandwich of resentments, loyalties, exaltations, ideas, theologies, and superstitions.
But attention to complication was foreign to Carmichael’s image of himself. He read the wavering French philosophers (his reading of French philosophers figured in his own glamour), but he chose to be a radical instead of a philosopher, and he signaled his radicalism by choosing Fanon as his favorite philosopher. A radical is defined by his refusal to waver. Carmichael preferred, instead, to provoke. The TV interviewer David Frost famously asked him who among white men he most admired. And Carmichael boldly displayed his fidelity to the anti-Zionist cause by answering in the fashion that, from time to time, the leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood have always liked to do, which is slyly and provocatively, with the explanation that, although he felt no admiration, the greatest of white men was Hitler, “a genius.” Hitler — even if “what he did was wrong, was evil, etc.”
That was in 1970. The interview shocked a great many people who admired Stokely Carmichael. This he must have enjoyed. All those kids he used to know at Bronx Science? Bayard Rustin? He stuck it to them! But no one should have been surprised. The cartoon in the SNCC newsletter in 1967, the one that reappeared at Harvard back in February of 2024, had already made obvious what sort of intellectual evolution was at work.
The cartoon was a small thing, artistically speaking. Ideologically speaking, though, it was capacious. It was the anti-Zionism of the Middle East in its grotesque sandwich version, minus the tasty fundamental ingredient of Islamic theology, which was not suitable for Western palates. This meant a joining together of the global revolutionary left and the extreme right, anti- imperialists and fascists alike — a cartoon whose iconogra-phy drew on the Cuban left-wing poster-art style of the 1960s (visible in the machete that is about to sever the nooses), and drew as well on Nazi graphic art of the 1930s and 1940s. Or perhaps the cartoon drew on the iconography of the anti-Se-mitic campaign during the Dreyfus affair in France in the 1890s, with its images of a hidden and sinister Jewish power, lurking fiendishly over a helpless world.
This fateful and miserable cartoon, then — how did this minor revenant make its way into the Harvard University turmoil, five months after the October 7 massacre? Harvard has established a further commission on anti-Semitism, now that a first commission has fallen apart, and the members of the new commission, unless it, too, has fallen apart, are bound to pause over that cartoon and its ghostly reappearance. But I suspect that inquiries into university anti-Semitism are never going to get to the heart of this particular controversy, nor any of the related controversies across the academic world.
There is a problem even in the subject of the inquiry, which by now everyone has come to notice. The definition of anti-Semitism, after all — how is that going to be nailed down? If someone says that anti-Semitism nowadays consists of holding Israel to standards that apply to no other country, somebody else is bound to reply, “Well, I do think that Israel is the worst country on earth. And a white settler-colonialist state has no right to exist just because it happens to be Jewish. And how dare you drag in the Nazis! These are slanders demagogically deployed to prevent large numbers of us from expounding the well-supported human-rights conclusions of our scholarly research, which are endorsed by seventeen Jewish professors!,” and so forth — which will sink the inquiry into a muddle from which only bubbles will rise to the surface.
If I were a university president with the autocratic power to make professors do what I want, I would mobilize the more level-headed ones under my command to undertake a broader investigation. This would be an inquiry into a climate of opinion that hovers over the university humanities departments and maybe a few other places, and over the art world and the literary world, and seeps at times into the mainstream press. The climate of opinion is conventionally described as a leftism. But I think it is more usefully described as a politicized legacy of the avant-garde, which is why the arts and the humanities departments tend to be its principal center, instead of the social sciences and the economics department, where leftwing opinions normally ought to flourish, if they are going to flourish at all. This is the avant-garde that has oscillated for more than a century from extreme left to extreme right, and from the marvelous to the horrendous, and back again, always in pursuit of a single notion, roughly speaking.
The single notion is the idea that deep truths lurk invisibly beneath the falsities of modern life, and, if only the truths were revealed, a new era would dawn. The new era might be described in different ways. It might be a new literary religion, according to the splendidly creative anarchist poets and their friends in France in the 1890s, who largely founded this strand of the modern avant-garde; or a return to the barbarian glories of authentic experience, according to the right-wing German philosophers in the 1920s and 1930s; or a social emancipation, according to the French postmodernists, whose genius consisted of drawing together the artistic flashes and playfulness of the left-wing poets and the profundities of the right-wing philosophers. And the deep truths might likewise be described in different ways. They might be a binary truth of language, based on a contrast of signs and differentiations. Or a binary truth of music, based on a contrast of sounds and silence. They tend to be, in any case, almost mathematical in their symmetries. They are elegant truths, pleasing to the religious imagination, or the Platonist imagination, or the poetic imagination — truths suited, in short, to the arts and to the vagaries of metaphysics.
The version of this sort of thing that has lately condensed into a climate of opinion in the humanities departments and the world of the arts is less abstract, therefore less pleasing. But the simplicity has remained appealing. It is a social analysis, in which the deep truth is considered to be Fanon’s conflict between the colonized and the colonizer, or the oppressed and the oppressor. Everyone has noticed the more-than-political success of this analysis. You see it in the art reviews, where the critics are likely to detect in the biography of artists under review an aesthetic of oppressed-versus-oppressor, whose dialectic accounts for whatever it is the artists may have done. Or you see it in the museum labels of older works, where the artists of the past are routinely deplored for having contributed to dreadful oppressions of times gone by, instead of doing what artists are supposed to do, which is to advance the progressive cause. Or you see it in the art itself, which turns out to be a visual commentary on an imputed verbal text, which, by implication, recounts a story of oppression and resistance.
This sort of thing may strike some people as very exciting for political reasons, or for moral reasons. It may seem uplifting, the way that bourgeois arts in the nineteenth century were supposed to be uplifting. The excitements may be philosophical–and–aesthetic. There is a satisfaction in supposing that art can be reduced to a dialectic of two elements. To see complexities and simplicities dissolve into one another is always stimulating. And if other people see a species of higher idiocy in the relentless art-world insistence on radical reductionism and moral sermonizing — well, better yet! Provocation is beauty, and beauty, provocation.
But the primary victim right now of this sort of thinking has turned out, somehow or another, to be the Jews. I suppose the somehow-or-another has been inevitable, given the allure of the either/or habit of mind. Stokely Carmichael was a man of our own moment, in this respect. It ought to have been obvious, in connection to Israel and Palestine, that reductionist simplicities of the colonized/colonizer sort were never going to apply in any ordinary or realistic way. It is not just a matter of mistaking refugees for colonialists. Everybody does know, after all, or sort of knows, that a good half of the accused white colonialist settlers, perhaps a slight majority of them, fled to Israel from the Arab countries and the largely Muslim zones of Central Asia, not to mention a couple of Jewish demographic percentage points that fled to Israel from East Africa.
If the planet is to be divided into — still another Manichaean phrase — “the West and the Rest,” it ought to be obvious that Israel falls into the West and the Rest at the same time, ethnographically speaking, which ought not to be possible, Manichaeanly speaking. The war right now in Gaza may even hint at Israel’s bifurcated nature. Israel’s army and its commanders turn out to be extremely capable, disciplined, and conscientious in the style of a modern Western army. But the army and at least some of its commanders also appear to have worried about mass suffering only begrudgingly, and some of the better-known leaders of Israel’s disastrous government make a display of worrying about mass suffering not at all. Or they stand openly in favor of mass suffering, quite as if Israel, which appears on the map to be merely one more Middle Eastern country, may be, in fact, one more Middle Eastern country, militarily speaking. And just as Saudi Arabia’s anti-Islamist intervention in Yemen produced a humanitarian disaster, so has Israel’s anti-Islamist intervention in Gaza, even if not on the Saudi scale, in all-too-faithful conformity to the regional style.
But everything about the prevailing climate of opinion in corners of the academy and in the world of the arts makes it difficult to look the various complexities and nuances in the face. So there are a great many people who gaze at Israel and prefer to see South Africa and its past. They do not see one more bloodbath in a history of even larger Middle Eastern bloodbaths. They prefer to see what the Islamists have always claimed to see, which is the crime against God, or the maximum crime of crimes, namely, an outright extermination of an entire people, such that “genocide,” the word, has become a catch-phrase. They see the Jews as Nazis, which has been a theme of the Islamist hysteria against Zionism for many decades. They decline to see anything at all about Hamas’s nature, doctrines, and practices, even if they do see those things. They see that resistance to what they imagine to be white settler-colonialism is righteous, and self-defense is monstrous. And the October 7 massacre seems to them — such is the logic, it is inescapable — a good thing, not just on balance. The October 7 massacre is a good thing absolutely. A good thing in the name of humanitarianism. And in the name of enlightenment, no less. It is a good thing, morally speaking, or psychologically speaking. An occasion for joy. Which some people express openly, even while denying that they want to kill the Jews; and other people merely infer, while denying they are inferring anything of the sort; and other people claim to oppose, but infer anyway.
The celebration of bad faith reaches its acme in the dreadful chants, “From the river to the sea” and “Globalize the intifada,” which mean, of course, the reduction of fifty per cent of the world’s Jewish population to statelessness (in the first instance) and a worldwide terrorist campaign against Jews (in the second instance) — but which, we are told, mean, instead, “human rights for Palestinians” and “spirited worldwide protest.” Except that everyone knows that, on the contrary, those slogans are ventures into transgression, which is why young people like to chant them. And no one wants to acknowledge what the transgression is. And no one wants to acknowledge how shocking it is that, in the United States and in France and perhaps in other places, a mass movement of students, led by the student elite, has arisen in favor of those unacknowledged transgressions.
What should the universities do? I would mobilize my imaginary committee to confront the broader climate of opinion as a whole. This would mean recognizing that the wave of virulent campus anti-Zionism, hidden and overt, together with the wave of virulent hatred in the art and literary worlds, amounts to something more than a failure of civility. It is an intellectual crisis. And the source of the crisis is not the students, and not a handful of radical organizations, either, even if the radical organizations are awful. Nor is the source merely the handful of professors who look and sound crazy. The source is a series of doctrines and assumptions that have degenerated from something authentically interesting into something grotesque, quietly presided over by professors who look and sound not just reasonable but attractively up-to-date. It is a development similar to the intellectual degeneration many decades ago of the brilliant and fiery Stokely Carmichael, except on an enormous university scale.
I would mobilize my committee to inquire into the origin and evolution of the doctrines and assumptions, and the manner of their degeneration. My model for this would be Marx and Engels, who formed a two-person committee of their own to do something similar in their own day by composing a book called The German Ideology. This was a study of the German philosophers in their era and the climate of opinion they generated, with “ideology” understood in the Marxist sense, which is pejorative. I would mobilize my committee to produce something along similar lines, to be called The University Ideology. It would be a study of the delusions of the humanities departments and related fields in our own era, with “ideology” likewise meant pejoratively. An intellectual revolution would be my committee’s goal — a self-revolution in the universities, in the hope that the art and literary worlds might respond with similar self-revolutions. This would be wonderfully stimulating.
But it may be that self-revolutions are not every university’s first instinct. It may be that, in the university administra-tions, a good many people, having observed the coarsening of discussion and debate over the last few months, will prefer a different course of action. They will prefer to mount a scapegoat persecution, intent on singling out the more obstreperous students. They will blame the “outside agitators,” who plainly do exist. Or they will focus their attention on the more outrageous and embarrassing professors, who are not too numerous, in the hope that, if only the obstreperous, the outsiders, the outrageous, and the embarrassing were suspended, expelled, arrested, chastised, fired, or demoted, the universities could breathe in peace for a moment. And then, at last, the universities could move on to the main step. This will be a call for renewed civility, for academic freedom, for tolerance, and for reasoned debate. It will be, in short, a search for the perfect speech code.
Am I right about this? If I am, the university response to the crisis of the last many months will end up as an institutional effort to avoid looking into what is fundamentally the problem, which is not an outbreak of incivility, but is, instead, a bad-faith bad turn, ultra-left and ultra-right at the same time, in the evolution of ideas, not just in the universities but in the art and literary worlds, not just in America, but also in Europe.
