I have been working on this article, which argues the importance of contextualizing Hamas’s attack on Israel of October 7, 2023 and attempts to do so in relation to both Palestinian and Israeli historical “memories,” for the last two months.
Hi Derek, I enjoyed reading your post, so thank you for sharing. This said, in my view, every contextualisation provides a historical reason and rationale, tacitly or otherwise, so opening the space for the current accusation of justifying reprehensible actions. The best that one can then try to offer is a symmetric account. This, I think, is perhaps missing from your account, at least in the sense that the two narratives seem to me uneven. I don't gain as clear a sense of the Israeli perspective and how the events of October 7 come to be configured as the zero point. In other words, I think that the first part of your argument provides a powerful account of all that which gets forgotten with the refusal to contextualise. What I may have missed however is how the resetting of the clock was realised and credibly so. It took a few days for the setting of October 7 as hour zero to bed in and become generally accepted in large swathes of the world, and in a manner that foreclosed any appeal to historical context. I would be very interested in your thoughts on this.
Hi Paolo, finally a response. (1) While I accept that in practice the borderline between contextualization and justification can often be fuzzy, in principle I see no difficulty. Surely I can, say, reconstruct the circumstances that preceded the election of Adolf Hitler in 1933 (Germany's defeat in WW1, draconian reparations, Weimar kulturkampf, the great depression, etc], and make some attempt to reconstruct the way these were framed and made sense of by Nazi ideology, without ipso facto subscribing to that ideology? This is standard Max Weber, and all I have attempted to do in this paper. The alternative, it seems to me, is to give up any attempt at historical explanation entirely and operate entirely in terms of abstract (i.e., contemporary and culture/bound?) moral categories. (2] I wasn't aiming at symmetry, and have made this clearer in the rewrite (thanks for raising this). I spent more time on the Palestinian narrative because the Israeli one is much better known in the west. (3) I'm not sure that it took long for the Israeli narrative of Oct 7 to bed in. What struck me, on the contrary, was how quickly the Israeli propaganda machine clicked in with atrocity stories, many of which have subsequently been disproved (e.g., beheaded babies) or shown to be highly exaggerated, while other relevant information (like deaths from IDF friendly fire} got buried. What intrigues me--and I don't have any answers as to why--was how readily this was bought by western governments, including generally progressive ones like Canada's, and mainstream media like the NYT, and acted upon. Part of the answer no doubt has to do with economic and geopolitical interests and alliances, in which Israel is pivotal. But beyond that, and more worrying for me, is the deep-seated set of typically colonialist, not to say racist, attitudes toward Palestinians/Arabs/Muslims which all too readily explain their behavior as savagery, barbarism, the work of :human animals,: etc.
I don't want to belabour the point, so ignore what I write below if not useful to you. I have been thinking about and discussing the issue in Italy, a context that is possibly more polarised than either US or Britain, to pick two other places with which I am somewhat familiar. I am struck by the venom with which every attempt at contextualisation is received by the media and how it is repeatedly constructed as supporting Hamas: all contextualisation is justification, and of the most awful deeds and politics. No room for any Weberian nicety. This perhaps brings me to your closing response. I think that the insistence on refusing any contextualisation has much to do with the right's seeing it as an opportunity to undo the "cultural hegemony of the Left" by undermining the morality of the support that the Italian left has lent to the Palestinian cause from 1967 onward. More importantly, however, it has a lot more to do with the right's need to process its own past (see also the ongoing erasure of Italy's own colonial past under the current government's plans to displace French "neocolonial" policies for the "African continent"). From this point of view, regarding October 7 as existential moment in the history of the Jewish people, tout court, is fundamentally important to the Italian right. October 7 must be comparable to the Holocaust.
Couldn't agree more. It's the same here. Very polarized in both Canada and US, where people have lost jobs and more over pro-Palestinian (and therefore "antisemitic" speech). I have now submitted a revised version to Canadian Dimension. Where can I send it to you?
Paolo, thanks for this. I'll respond properly in a day or two. Yesterday I had a request to publish this in Canadian Dimension and am editing and updating it, which involves inter alia converting all footnotes to hyperlinks, a time-consuming process. May I cite you among those I acknowledge as having read and commented on the piece?
Hi Derek, I enjoyed reading your post, so thank you for sharing. This said, in my view, every contextualisation provides a historical reason and rationale, tacitly or otherwise, so opening the space for the current accusation of justifying reprehensible actions. The best that one can then try to offer is a symmetric account. This, I think, is perhaps missing from your account, at least in the sense that the two narratives seem to me uneven. I don't gain as clear a sense of the Israeli perspective and how the events of October 7 come to be configured as the zero point. In other words, I think that the first part of your argument provides a powerful account of all that which gets forgotten with the refusal to contextualise. What I may have missed however is how the resetting of the clock was realised and credibly so. It took a few days for the setting of October 7 as hour zero to bed in and become generally accepted in large swathes of the world, and in a manner that foreclosed any appeal to historical context. I would be very interested in your thoughts on this.
Hi Paolo, finally a response. (1) While I accept that in practice the borderline between contextualization and justification can often be fuzzy, in principle I see no difficulty. Surely I can, say, reconstruct the circumstances that preceded the election of Adolf Hitler in 1933 (Germany's defeat in WW1, draconian reparations, Weimar kulturkampf, the great depression, etc], and make some attempt to reconstruct the way these were framed and made sense of by Nazi ideology, without ipso facto subscribing to that ideology? This is standard Max Weber, and all I have attempted to do in this paper. The alternative, it seems to me, is to give up any attempt at historical explanation entirely and operate entirely in terms of abstract (i.e., contemporary and culture/bound?) moral categories. (2] I wasn't aiming at symmetry, and have made this clearer in the rewrite (thanks for raising this). I spent more time on the Palestinian narrative because the Israeli one is much better known in the west. (3) I'm not sure that it took long for the Israeli narrative of Oct 7 to bed in. What struck me, on the contrary, was how quickly the Israeli propaganda machine clicked in with atrocity stories, many of which have subsequently been disproved (e.g., beheaded babies) or shown to be highly exaggerated, while other relevant information (like deaths from IDF friendly fire} got buried. What intrigues me--and I don't have any answers as to why--was how readily this was bought by western governments, including generally progressive ones like Canada's, and mainstream media like the NYT, and acted upon. Part of the answer no doubt has to do with economic and geopolitical interests and alliances, in which Israel is pivotal. But beyond that, and more worrying for me, is the deep-seated set of typically colonialist, not to say racist, attitudes toward Palestinians/Arabs/Muslims which all too readily explain their behavior as savagery, barbarism, the work of :human animals,: etc.
I don't want to belabour the point, so ignore what I write below if not useful to you. I have been thinking about and discussing the issue in Italy, a context that is possibly more polarised than either US or Britain, to pick two other places with which I am somewhat familiar. I am struck by the venom with which every attempt at contextualisation is received by the media and how it is repeatedly constructed as supporting Hamas: all contextualisation is justification, and of the most awful deeds and politics. No room for any Weberian nicety. This perhaps brings me to your closing response. I think that the insistence on refusing any contextualisation has much to do with the right's seeing it as an opportunity to undo the "cultural hegemony of the Left" by undermining the morality of the support that the Italian left has lent to the Palestinian cause from 1967 onward. More importantly, however, it has a lot more to do with the right's need to process its own past (see also the ongoing erasure of Italy's own colonial past under the current government's plans to displace French "neocolonial" policies for the "African continent"). From this point of view, regarding October 7 as existential moment in the history of the Jewish people, tout court, is fundamentally important to the Italian right. October 7 must be comparable to the Holocaust.
Couldn't agree more. It's the same here. Very polarized in both Canada and US, where people have lost jobs and more over pro-Palestinian (and therefore "antisemitic" speech). I have now submitted a revised version to Canadian Dimension. Where can I send it to you?
Paolo, thanks for this. I'll respond properly in a day or two. Yesterday I had a request to publish this in Canadian Dimension and am editing and updating it, which involves inter alia converting all footnotes to hyperlinks, a time-consuming process. May I cite you among those I acknowledge as having read and commented on the piece?
Sure