Orthodox icon of Christ, symbol of compassion and truth.
1.
The scales of abstraction always even out because abstractions have no weightiness. When we render “Israeli” and “Palestinian” into abstract quantities of moral speculation we end up with the platitudinous refrain “both sides are wrong”. As abstractions, these categories have no weight at all, an entirely equivalent weightlessness, zero counterpoised against zero. We cannot gauge the real meaning of this situation by rendering its terms conceptually neutral. That is why we need a Marxist materialism that is socially and historically intelligible, that is genuinely concrete. Terms with a social and historical charge can be weighed in the balance because they have a concrete meaning. This intelligible contact with the world reveals that partisanship is truth. A Palestinian victory would be a stage in the unveiling of the present world in its real being, beyond bourgeois idealisms, and reactionary utopianisms (of which Zionism is a type). To support Israel is to wrap one’s mind in veils of untruth. Zionism itself, however, already enwraps this world as an integral thread in the fabric of American empire. Therefore, it is incumbent on all of us to grasp what this fabric is, to comprehend the contours of its folds, and to tear it to pieces from the inside.
2.
In platitude we see the kinship between a rationality that is not concretely grounded in the intelligibility of its social and historical situation and a vacuous sentimentality. Non-materialist rationality is irrational, the empty space of neutral terms which act as the vessel for any and every irrationality. Israeli “hasbara” is the most intensified form, at present, of the deployment of non-material rationality and sentimentality, deceptions in the service of the utopian deception that is Zionism itself. It is through such deceptions that another partisanship is manufactured, a partisanship whose coinage is false through and through. Rather than the grounded criterion of social and historical reality, we infuse our emptied categories (e.g. “Israeli” and “Palestinian”) with the dross of sentimentality. The scales are thereby manipulated. We distribute as much weight as we like to whatever side we like. Israelis are now victims. Another holocaust is under way. Anti-Zionism is anti-semitism. The terms of this conflict have already been rendered conceptually neutral for us, first and foremost through hasbara, and secondly through the moral hypocrites that uncritically perpetuate what is, at bottom, a Zionist framing of the conflict. The decisive factor in this neutralized balance consists in the distribution of these sentimental charges, and the practical capacity to effect such a distribution depends on the presence of real infrastructure—media infrastructure, political infrastructure, military infrastructure, imperial infrastructure. In brief, it belongs to the historically and socially subsisting reality of American imperialism, a reality which is obliged to proliferate such untruths, because its very existence is in contradiction with the real form of society and history. Imperialism is an unreal reality, a paper tiger with real claws. Imperialism, then, is sophistry itself, magnified to the level of world-spanning institution. Sophistry is untruth, and untruth is not, and yet this unreality of the sophist strikes at us with claws that are capable of drawing real blood. Just as Socrates enters into real conflict with the unreal “nothing” that is sophistry, so, too, socialism must enter into conflict with the “paper tiger” of imperialism. In social and historical terms, untruth is overthrown through real combat, by spilling both blood and ink.
3.
An objection of the form “Israel is no utopia—how can one rightly call Zionism a 'utopianism'?” lacks validity. No utopianism results in utopia. Utopia is not what utopianism concretely is. Therefore, every utopianism becomes a practice of sophistry. That is its consolation for the utopia that it will never attain. “Hasbara” is the consolation of the Israeli's bad conscience, his consciousness of his own untruth. The early project of “socialist Zionism” became what it was always destined to be when it transmuted its kibbutz infrastructure into pure hasbara. The kibbutz was always superfluous to their utopia. Zionism's essence was hasbara from the beginning. The Israeli right was simply making a judicious application of Occam's razor when they abolished every last vestige of the Israeli state's putative “socialism”. Why multiply entities needlessly? Zionist utopia was always already a matter empty words armed with claws.
4.
The Buddhists are correct when they state that compassion (karuna) and truth (prajna) are the same thing, and their conception of "compassion" is of one skillfully applied (upaya). In the context of Palestine, compassion is the barrel of a gun aimed at the wretched colonizer. The pain that a doctor inflicts on us is intended to heal us. Israel is a festering wound in geopolitical and historical space, an advance colony of Western imperialism in the Middle East, a katechon against the tide of world socialism. It must be excised. This is compassion. The doctor who would balk before the necessary, who is unwilling or incapable of lifting and applying the scalpel, perforce hates his patient. The truth of the patient is his life, and the truth of the present historical moment is the burgeoning reality that is already bursting the chains of utopianism and idealism that restrict its life, the fabric of untruth under which it is suffocating. The struggle of the working class and the struggle of the Palestinian people are one and the same partisanship. They are one and the same truth. They are one and the same glow of universal compassion.
5.
“From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is the song of the Real. It is a Word to be made flesh through revolutionary struggle. The Word of truth comes not in peace, but with a sword.