Nerdeen Kiswani and Netanyahu:

Fighting monsters without becoming monsters.

The moral degradation of most pro-Palestinian movements in the West is truly shocking. Palestine for the vast majority of these pro-Palestinian activists simply fits in very well with their already existing anti-capitalist and anti-colonialist agendas which satisfy the selected interest groups to which they already belong and with which they have been making a career of political, academic or business success.

Since we live in the attention economy almost every political issue is full of polish, monetized bias or simply operational utility for narrow interests that easily lends itself to be used as a proxy for credible emotional outpourings showing universal solidarity and empathy towards the most oppressed.

Suddenly, as soon as grotesquely repulsive inhumane acts become the news navel of every social network in the world, Palestine is placed at the epicenter of all human misfortunes that although prior to October 7, 2023 did not emotionally touch so many people Hamas did the “charitable” and “humanitarian” work of sacrificing human lives in the most gruesome way possible to make humanity humanely concerned about Palestinian freedom.

These spokesmen for Palestinian freedom are not interested in the fact that Hamas is not interested in the Palestinians but only in its religious mission to exterminate Israel. These Palestinian freedom spokesmen are not interested in the fact that Iran, Hezbollah and Morocco had planned coordinated actions to receive Hamas transmissions while killing Israelis. They do not care that the geographic area where Palestine is located is not interested in the welfare of the Palestinians, let alone the creation of a Palestinian state.

These useful fools on the left who are pro-Palestinian proxies are not interested in the fact that the terrorist networks throughout the Middle East are only interested in creating a large radical Islamist coalition that will expel all Jews but fundamentally all infidels.

But let’s be brutally honest. These useful fools are not really fools. The vast majority of these pro-Palestinian activists are in favor of the Great Anti-Capitalist Reset and of finding any means (including immoral and criminal) to accelerate the chaos that would bring for them the longed-for socialist revolution that has already failed so many times.

The terrorist suicide ontology shares Che Guevara’s philosophy of death. Middle Eastern terrorists cannot integrate into ordinary life in the same sense that Che Guevara could not integrate into life in Cuba after the revolution.

The revolution for both the left and Hamas has to continue and it is a global revolution, in the case of Hamas Islamist and not Guevarist. All this necrophiliac ontology of the left feels a great shame with its historical past and mostly sees the present as the decadent expression of that past that must be radically changed as Marx wanted.

That is why someone like Nerdeen Kiswani, a Palestinian-American activist living in New York, often uploads quotes from Che Guevara to her Instagram account. Perhaps as a memorial to Che’s 1959 visit to the Gaza Strip.

The progre left wants a motif of revolution and permanent “resistance”, exactly as Che wanted it and as Kiswani wants it. And what better excuse for this “resistance” than to dream of the disappearance of the State of Israel and also of course of the disintegration of the United States.

It is so easy and demagogic to immediately pour out gestures of solidarity for the “oppressed” in general defined as the anonymous silent majority in any country, but in this case, Palestine.

And it is not that we should not show signs of empathy for human suffering regardless of people’s humanity, but empathy with suffering should not imply that the sufferer is automatically morally right.

Empathy with those who suffer should not automatically imply that the sufferer has the moral high ground or, worse, that the sufferer has license to commit heinous acts and be rationalized as a guilt to be borne by his oppressors.

No, the oppressed have no immunity from evil, no pardons for the fact that they are oppressed. In fact, it is when extreme oppression still keeps us on the side of good that the true value and morality of the oppressed comes to the surface.

Suffering to the extreme is not a condition for righteous moral conduct. The Palestinian people are not morally righteous on the basis of their suffering, but on the basis of their righteous moral conduct given the most inhumane and atrocious conditions.

We cannot think of a morally just Palestine as long as Hamas continues to maintain by force or intimidation the leadership of Gaza.

The Palestine/Israel conflict is supposed to continue not only because Palestine does not want and has never wanted the solution of coexisting as another state next to Israel but also because additionally and fundamentally the revolutionary and guerrilla “resistance” translated in the end as terrorism has become for many radical sectors without resources the only viable solution as a legacy of a culture based on all or nothing without negotiation.

It is my opinion that the processes of colonization are natural stages of human civilizational development and naturally it was inevitable that this process was violent. These processes in the end and even with all their violent history favored both the colonizer and the colonized.

The evolution of humanity from endogamous tribes to exogamous tribes under the prohibition of incest was a very painful and bloody transition, full of bestiality and human cannibalism. Colonialism is no longer and should not and cannot be part of the exchanges between nations.

However, to think of colonialism as a shameful human past for being violent and cruel is like punishing a crocodile for having eaten alive a zebra crossing the river. We as humans traded in the past in a very clumsy and animalistic way but in the same sense that we respect the ethology of the crocodile so should we respect the ethology of our ancestors and ancestors which was naturally primitive and animalistic.

But colonialism was not fundamentally a story between the crocodile and the zebra, it was also a brutal story of ant colonies with legendary battles in the undergrowth against adversaries and internal battles of cruel reigns against the inefficiency of their own queens.

Human colonialism mostly benefited both sides although not equally, but equity today in terms of having equity of opportunity is much more demanding than it was in 1948.

It is clear that Jews can live and have proven to be able to adapt to living in other cultures or to be more precise, they can tolerate other cultures without assimilating them. Unfortunately, this is not the case in Palestine. The Palestinians, it is not that they cannot tolerate other cultures, but rather that in Palestine as in the Middle East there are more cases of intolerance towards other cultures.

And it is not the case that Palestinians have to be multicultural. Multiculturalism is not the obligation of any nation as long as it does not manifest itself as racism by denying the basic rights of another culture.

What has happened with the vast majority of pro-Palestinian demonstrations is that the moral position has mattered more than the legal position, that is, the belief in the just cause of the Palestinians has been more important than any of the crimes that Hamas has committed as a symbol of Palestinian resistance to Israel’s so-called colonial hegemony.

Now this phenomenon of the moral hijacking the legal has extended equally to Israel’s counterattack. What has mattered to the Israeli armed forces has not been whether crimes have been and continue to be committed against the Palestinian civilian population if those who committed and continue to commit them had more than sufficient reason to commit them to such an extent that they would not be considered criminals but fighters against barbarism.

So we have resistance fighters on the one hand and fighters against barbarism on the other. The minds of Kiswani and Netanyahu seem rather infested by the Hamas virus and we do not know in which of the two narratives the virus has gone beyond the incubation phase and whether it will eventually take full control as a replicated Hamas demon figure.

Marvel movies are full of these basic teachings for children that seem not applicable to real life but this has been for better or for worse the basic moral principles in which Hollywood has educated every good American.

And that’s the problem when too high a collateral damage of human loss becomes a Pyrrhic victory on the PR level for Israel and the United States. Hamas as the personification of evil has two things going for it to play the good card. The first is that the dispute over land ownership is difficult to win morally if one claims the right to property on the basis of its possession two millennia ago.

Under that reasoning we would also have to make real the return of natural resources exploited by the metropolises to their colonies two millennia ago. All this would obviously be absurd and hence the loss of the moral battle from Israel’s side.

The second thing in favor of Hamas is that Palestine lacks any political-economic-military infrastructure to properly defend itself as a state and therefore Israel, whether it is right or wrong, will always be able to do its will against Palestine if it disagrees with the Palestinians to the point of both having to use brute force.

There is no doubt that Hamas represents the side of evil in this conflict but we cannot say entirely that Israel represents the side of good. Israel has been tainted by evil but Israel is not evil. And by the same token, the people of Palestine have been tainted by evil but Palestine is not evil.

Nietzsche, referring to evil, wrote:

“He who fights with monsters, beware of becoming a monster himself. When you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.”

We cannot afford the inhuman luxury of not distinguishing between evil (Hamas) and those trying to resist evil and not quite getting it right (the citizens of Palestine and the citizens of Israel). And here Netanyahu does not represent evil since his violating the good happens under the pressures put on him by his enemies and not in the wanton and vicious manner in which Hamas raped women, killed old people and burned children to the sickening public glee of the psychopath.

Netanyahu has a duty and responsibility to eliminate Hamas both for the good of Israel and for the good of Palestine, and he will most likely have to make the sacrifice of soiling his own morals not as a strategic act but as an act of survival in the face of the fact that Hamas will continue to commit the atrocities it has already committed and will continue to use civilian Palestinians as a military shield of protection.

I do not agree with some of Netanyahu’s harsh policies because I would not say as Nietzsche said, “…throw roses into the abyss and say, ‘here is my thanks to the monster that failed to swallow me alive.’” I would rather say, “… throw a ladder into the abyss and say, ‘here is my thanks to the monster who did not manage to dine at my table’.”

In my opinion Netanyahu has failed to create, stimulate and seek dialogue with the Palestinians. And it is not that he has not tried but that seeking it under the premise that there is something special about Jews that binds them to the land they share with the Palestinians that makes Jews naturally privileged in relation to Palestinians is in fact a morally wrong beginning of dialogue.

When Europeans or Americans invite others to their land as citizens, it is not morally permissible to do so under the premise of the so-called native feel and make it visible to the welcome outsiders that the land where they now live belongs to them something less than to those who have been the true owners of it for millennia.

When Netanyahu gives notice to the Gazatis to move south to get them out of the danger zone before the start of the war he should not only have given more time for the mobilization of so many people but more time to gather intelligence and see the possibilities of launching a special forces attack that could eliminate the top Hamas leaders without the need to drop so many bombs in civilian areas with military infrastructure.

There must be other ways to mitigate the loss of innocent lives but it is impossible to deny that it is an extremely difficult situation when Hamas soldiers hide behind the population and put their military command offices in hospitals and civilian buildings.

In my opinion we cannot ask Netanyahu for a ceasefire but a change of military strategy whereby specialized commandos can be sent in as they did in the hunt for Osama Bin Laden in Afghanistan.

On the other hand, we can demand humanity for the Palestinians in the face of the great amount of human losses but we cannot demand freedom for the Palestinians unless it is the Palestinians living in Palestine who demand it and the rest of the world gives its support.

It is the Palestinians in Palestine who can really change the course of things in Palestine and not the agents of influence of those change from outside who mostly have other political agendas of their own that satisfy their own interests more than the interests of the Palestinians in Palestine although there are legitimate intersections of political agendas.

We can sympathize with the Palestinians’ own demand for freedom but to demand freedom on behalf of the Palestinians is simply to play political proxy for the cause of other groups for the convenience it offers in giving visibility to our own political agenda.

It is hard for me to trust the progressive left’s criticism of Netanyahu and Israel as it is largely skewed by criticism of right wing ideas in general. To me there is no doubt that Netanyahu has morally tainted himself by not knowing how to resort to other methods of military and political combat that could considerably reduce the loss of innocent lives but I do not consider him a war criminal.

It was known in advance that Hamas uses human shields as a tactic of war. It was known in advance that this barbaric way of conducting warfare is part of the yoke imposed by Hamas on the Palestinians. It was known in advance by the same pro-Palestinians who are now so vehemently opposed to the killing of innocent lives by this method that it is not the first and will not be the last time that Hamas uses and will use such methods unless they are eliminated at the root.

Eliminating Hamas cannot be accomplished without the loss of innocent human life precisely because of the nature in which Hamas conditions the way it conducts warfare. Yet for me it is unacceptable to indiscriminately bomb hospitals or refugee camps simply because there are senior Hamas leaders.

If all this was known in advance, why then are the pro-Palestinians so astonished at the deaths of so many innocent Palestinians? Why were there no mass protests against Hamas as there are now when it is too late to prevent the loss of so many innocent lives? Did we really have to wait for Hamas to do its terrorist acts and Israel to respond in the militarily clumsy way we knew it would beforehand before now protesting and calling it a genocide in horror?

The answer is simple, because those pro-Palestinians outside Palestine were too busy with their own problems to show their condemnation of Hamas in peacetime and because many also believe it is good to let a war of human slaughter happen between Palestinians and Israelis since Israel will always lose on the ideological ground by causing more damage to human lives than, even if directly promoted and sponsored by Hamas, the direct blame will fall populistically on Israel. Letting Hamas terrorize as it does is for many of these pro-Palestinians part of the “resistance”.

And it is not that terrorism has supplanted the natural revolutionary fervor of the left but that the left today has become hypocritically complicit with every terrorist act that causes harm to the Western world in the face of its own cowardice and loss of protagonism in sponsoring revolutionary actions.

Much of the silence of the pro-Palestinians during the peace period is complicit in all this massacre of innocent lives in the Gaza Strip. The hypocrisy and cynicism of many of these pro-Palestinians is easy to dismantle.

Today many of them protest in favor of Palestine because the Palestinian situation satisfies part of their own progressive political agendas of finding any excuse to criticize once again capitalism, Western society, the United States, what they call the “far right” which is the entire right wing and above all the white supremacist patriarchy. That is why being pro-Palestine, now that it is a hot topic, makes their own leftist agendas visible.

One cannot call for freedom for Palestine unless we know clearly what that freedom would include. If that freedom includes the disappearance of the State of Israel what they really want with such a request is to prolong the conflict indefinitely in the same sense that progressives want to prolong racial conflict, gender conflict and identity politics conflicts indefinitely.

Hamas wants to eliminate not only Israel, it would be naive to think so. Hamas wants to eliminate Israel and all that Israel represents as part of Western culture. Hamas wants to eliminate and destroy Western culture. Hamas is in tandem with the great anti-capitalist movements of the Western world and uses them as useful fools for its fundamentalist purposes.

Not surprisingly, Western progressives identify with much of the anti-Western fighting spirit of Hamas which in reality is nothing other than the same anti-capitalist spirit of the contemporary left. That is why it is easy to see all these pro-Palestinian protests as in reality an extension of the anti-capitalist ideology of today’s left and at the same time an opportunity for them to insist once again that capitalism does not work.

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Nerdeen Kiswani is an anti-Israel activist and co-founder and leader of Within Our Lifetime-United for Palestine (WOL), a radical New York-based anti-Israel organization that routinely expresses support for violence against Israel.

• Kiswani’s antisemitism is clearly expressed via her expressions of extreme anti-Zionist rhetoric, including her calls for all “Zionists” to be vilified and expelled from community spaces, as well as her support for indiscriminate violence against Israel aimed at the country’s dissolution.
• Kiswani and WOL (founded in 2015) organize rallies in New York City that have drawn thousands of attendees, including events outside the Israeli consulate and pro-Israel organizations such as the Jewish National Fund (JNF).
• Kiswani and her organization explicitly call for the complete eradication of Israel, including for Israel to be “wiped off the map,” and have called for Israeli Jews to leave the country (both from the West Bank and in Israel proper).
• WOL and Kiswani frequently express support for acts of terror perpetrated by U.S.-designated terror groups, including the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).
• Kiswani habitually asserts that all Zionists, including American Jews who support Israel, are inherently bigoted and should be ostracized.
• On several occasions, Kiswani and WOL have promulgated classic antisemitic tropes, including those related to “Zionist” control over media and politics.
• Kiswani has been platformed by leftist outlets, including Haymarket Books.
• Kiswani became widely known after she delivered a May 2022 commencement speech for CUNY Law in which she excoriated “Zionists” and condemned “normalizing” trips to Israel.