Great philosophers can make great errors when they confront things that challenge their closely held beliefs. Theodore Adorno, a brilliant critic of classical music, wrote ignorant essays about pop and jazz. Noam Chomsky, whose work is fundamental to modern linguistics, has a naive grasp of how media operate. Michel Foucault, whose writing on discourses and authority shaped postmodern thought, regarded the Ayatollah Khomeini as a guide to liberation from Western materialism. And then there’s Judith Butler.
No scholar is more renowned when it comes to the concept of gender performativity. But when it comes to politics, Butler is nearly as reflexive as the protesters who defaced the posters of Israeli hostages and blamed the victims of October 7 for their deaths. In Butler’s theory of liberation, the subconscious does not exist; power relations are what matter, and resistance is paramount. This principle informs the belief that the massacre committed by Hamas requires a term more fitting then terrorism. “You can be for or against armed resistance,” she said recently at a gathering of leftists in Paris, “but let us at least call it armed resistance, and then we can have a debate about whether we think it’s right or wrong.” As if that terminology is objective, rather than laudatory, a reflection of Butler’s statement in 2006 that Hamas is part of the “global left.”
This is a striking example of what I call linguistic supremacy, a tendency to regard social reality as a construction that can be altered by manipulating the ways in which it is represented. That belief is central to identity politics, and it’s very useful, until it becomes a way to ignore complicating facts. Then it can be wielded as a tool to overlook whatever gets in the way of valorizing a struggle against oppression. Supporters of Hamas can refuse to face what it did in Israel.
There’s much to say about the glorifying of an authoritarian, fundamentalist force by a movement that stands for freedom and choice. There are many signs that, on its militant edges, the commitment to building a better world includes an attraction to violence—and male violence, at that. Nothing reveals this hidden fascination like the response by some leftists to what a UN envoy called “reasonable grounds to believe” that rape and gang-rape occurred at multiple sites on October 7. What the envoy found after a three-week investigation was “a catalogue of the most extreme and inhumane forms of killing, torture and other horrors,” along with “clear and convincing evidence” that some hostages have been subjected to sexual assault. How can that be justified in the name of resistance? If you’re a humanist, it can’t be. So doubt about the rapes must be sown.
At her presentation in Paris, Butler took an agnostic stance about this issue. She acknowledged finding the reports of rape “anguishing,” but she was unpersuaded by them. “Whether or not there is documentation about the claims,” Butler told her audience of French leftists, with what one reporter for Le Monde described as “a skeptical pout worthy of a police officer 50 years ago faced with a woman trying to lodge a complaint.” “OK,” Butler continued, “if there is documentation, than we deplore that, but we want to see the documentation.”
Effectively, Butler questioned the basis of most rape trials, since incontrovertible proof of a sexual assault is often hard to find. Many claims of sexual violence are adjudicated by examining convincing, if circumstantial evidence. That’s what happened in the trial of Harvey Weinstein. The only physical evidence that he had committed rape was the testimony of one woman about his abnormal genitals. Say what you may about due process, but a long history of ignoring the stories of assaulted women has led to the principle that these accounts are to be presumed credible unless there is solid evidence to the contrary. Accusers sometimes change their stories, women sometimes take years to come forward, and inconsistencies in details may arise, as they have around the reports of rape on October 7, but those aren’t grounds for dismissing a charge. Butler would make an exception for the attack on Israel. Like a defense attorney for Hamas, she wants to see the proof. And she is hardly the only leftist to take this line.
From the moment when witnesses came forward with their harrowing accounts, some progressives have attempted to disprove them. The New York Times has found itself attacked from within and outside the paper after it concluded that Hamas had “weaponized” sexual violence. Though a newly discovered video has contradicted one account, the Times reported on incidents at more than seven sites, so their story still stands. Yet, it has been picked apart like a carcass in a forest of hungry animals. Even the UN envoy’s report was questioned by publications that ran a picture of her posing with Israeli officials, as if that demonstrated a bias. Other leftists have argued that rape is always present in war—although so is carnage. You don’t have to change your mind about the murderous rampage in Gaza in order to condemn the savagery of Hamas. But you can’t ennoble that group unless the assaults never happened. This pretext is rightly called rape denialism.
****
A similar blindness affects the trendy idea that anti-Semitism is less serious than racism because it isn’t systemic. While that’s true in some parts of society and in most Western governments, the world I grew up in was a very different place. There were anti-Jewish quotas and restrictive property covenants, pervasive social discrimination and a suspicion that could only be mollified by mastering the art of not being “obvious.” This product of what the sociologist Erving Goffman called a moral stigma shaped my childhood, and it’s the reason why, as an adult, I gave my spouse’s Christian-sounding name when I made a restaurant reservation, until I realized that I was doing it because I thought we would be more likely to get a table. Anti-Semitism appeared in slang and in the names of ugly creatures such as the Jewfish or degraded instruments such as the Jews harp. It’s what motivated a boy to ask me, when I was 12, whether I would please show him my horns. Those days can come back, and every Jew with an iota of acuity knows that. Even when it is remote, danger is always a potential for us.
So, it’s deeply offensive to hear Butler contend that anti-Semitism today is merely a reaction to Zionism. “If the world is asked to accept that the State of Israel represents the Jewish people,” Butler told her audience, “should we be surprised if many people think that the Jewish people are the State of Israel?” This is a classic example of how conceptual thinking can displace the truth when it dismisses certain forms of bigotry while focusing on others.
Consider the taunts hurled at Jews by some people in the Palestinian movement, insults steeped in anti-Semitic tropes. To mention one of many repugnant incidents, protesters in Montreal shouted at a Jewish group, “You have no country.” This is an updated image of the rootless cosmopolitan, whom T.S. Eliot once described as “Chicago Semite Viennese.” Gaza is an occasion to express beliefs that were lodged in the speaker’s mind long before the slaughter. The current situation becomes a trigger for the return of the repressed.
St. Patrick’s Day in Cincinnati
Netanyahu shows his horns on Instagram
I’ve yet to hear Butler or anyone in the hardcore anti-colonial camp acknowledge that such attitudes exist in their midst. The far left dismisses the gravity of anti-Semitism, while the alt-right exploits its appeal. I’m accustomed to the ravings of hiphop Hitlers and the fascist fantasy of a white race replaced by people of color, incited by Jews. But I’m shocked by the belief that anti-Semitism is circumstantial rather than a set of assumptions encoded in the DNA of the West. The same movement that celebrates black and brown solidarity tells me that I must “disidentify” with my own people. Caring about them is not the same as defending what Israel has become, but being told that I mustn’t care is a way of saying, you can’t be Jewish like that. In a survey reported by The Forward, 30 percent of Jewish college students said they hide their identity in order to fit in. I know what that’s like, and no young person should have to do it.
***
Obliviousness to reality can prevent the most apparent facts from soiling the purity of one’s commitment. In Butler’s version of this cleansing, “Feminism, queer mobilization, trans mobilization have to all be in solidarity with Palestine now, because we all suffer from forms of state and regulatory violence that makes our live unlivable.” This statement fails to mention that abortion is illegal in Hamas-run Gaza, and that homosexuality is a crime there. Nor does Butler broach the issue of misogyny in this deeply patriarchal armed resistance. It’s quite possible to support decolonial movements without forgetting that they sometimes produce dictatorships. But first you have to step out from under the conceptual umbrella that allows you to pretend it isn’t raining.
Butler has avoided getting wet. For this philosopher, a just struggle can involve great violence as long as it includes an “aspiration to restructure the world” so people can live without violence. That idea can be used to excuse nearly anything in the dreadful recent history of combat. The bombing of Hiroshima can be framed as an attempt to create a more peaceful world. Or, to cite a less defensible example, the American invasion of Vietnam can be cast as a battle against Communist expansion—the infamous “domino theory.” If the end of liberation justifies the means, it’s much easier to ignore the bloody dialectic that unleashed the war in Gaza. Even more convenient is the insistence that the means never involved the end of sexual violence for its own sake
I haven’t captured the complexity of Butler’s work—it’s impossible to do that in a journalistic essay—so I want to acknowledge that it is nuanced and subtle. Also slippery. In one passage, it expands the rich tradition of critical theory; in another, it leads to newspeak. Still, the crisis in Gaza makes it very hard to be both militant and humane, and Butler may be grappling with that problem. A week after the original statements, Butler issued a “clarification” that reprimanded Hamas, offered more support for the claims of rape, and declared that “not all forms of resistance are justified, and some, like these, truly call for condemnation.” I assume that Butler wasn’t thinking about self-preservation; the first draft of any intellectual position should be subject to revision. We’ll see where it leads. But what’s most interesting about Butler’s reconsideration is the way it mirrors the left’s ambivalence.
It’s clear to me that the progressive response to the bloodbath in Gaza is not a single movement, but several of them, one dedicated to creating two adjacent states, and another committed to the destruction of Israel. I am in the former group; the other side includes people—many of them Jews—who want to see the Jewish state reborn as a secular, multi-ethnic democracy. (I don’t think that can happen until Jews are free to live in full equality across the Islamic world.) But the protests also include activists who support Hamas and some who refer to North America as a settler entity called Occupied Turtle Island. I recall a similar split in the antiwar movement of the 1960s, between those who called for “two, three, many Vietnams” and those who just wanted the fighting to end. This was a temperamental difference that attached itself to ideology, and I remember being caught in the middle, finally concluding, after several bouts of riotous behavior, that I didn’t want to see my country collapse.
The same sort of split exists in the anti-Zionist protests of today. Progressives will soon have to choose between Butler’s vision of the future and Biden’s. It’s a fateful decision, not just for Israelis and Palestinians, but also for radical politics, and the same crucial question hovers over it that always does: Which side are you on?
***
Since this essay was written, a freed hostage has come forward with an account of being sexually abused by one of her captors. Al-Jazeera retracted a fabricated story about Israeli troops committing sexual assault in Gaza. A group on X announced a boycott of the forthcoming James Bond movie because its lead actor is Jewish. An interview with Judith Butler in the Times focused on her ideas about gender without mentioning the statements Butler made about the atrocities on October 7. Rape? What rape?