The "visionary disease" that stalks our anti-Israel academic encampments

Or when cosplay collides with real human history

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In André Malraux’s celebrated novel Man’s Fate, which centers on a failed Communist insurrection in Shanghai, China during the early 1930s, a character by the name of Old Gisors – a onetime revolutionary cadre leader turned opium addict – laments that radicals do not really want to change the world, as Karl Marx, insisted.  

Rather, Malraux’s character says,

…what fascinates them in this idea, you see, is not real power, it's the illusion of being able to do exactly as they please. The king's power is the power to govern, isn't it? But man has no urge to govern--he has an urge to compel, as you said. To be more than a man, in a world of men. To escape man's fate, I was saying. Not powerful - all-powerful. The visionary disease, of which the will to power is only the intellectual justification, is the will to godhead - every man dreams of being god.

Both the obsessiveness and folly of youth frequently boil down to some variant of this “visionary disease”.  It is a disease that relentlessly penetrates both the rhetoric and convictions of the anti-Israel activists on American – and some European – campuses, who call for their imagined minions to “globalize the intifada”.

It is also primarily a distemper of America’s progressive neoliberal elites, who have been running the show for months where most of the action happens to be, that is, at the nation’s leading elite institutions such as Harvard, Columbia, Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania, University of Chicago, and the University of California.

One of the most pronounced symptoms of the malady, as Musa al-Gharbi underscores in a recent essay in Compact magazine, is politics as cosplay. 

All you have to do is visualize the thousands of white American upper middle class student protesters donning Bedouin keffiyehs (no “cultural appropriation” there), or as secular “nones” who otherwise would not be caught dead in either a church, a temple, or a mosque joining en masse in Muslim prayer on the UCLA campus, to get the point I’m making.

As al-Gharbi argues, “effective political action requires discipline, patience, and persistence, to the extent that Weber famously likened it to the ‘slow boring of hard boards.’”

However, he points out, “because the denizens of elite institutions are largely insulated from the consequences of politics…they often feel free to approach politics as a combination of a sport, a holy war, and a means of self-expression.”

Or perhaps a game of make-believe.

Cosplay has clearly become not only the “means of self-expression” for Ivy Leaguers, but for many campus crusaders in the sticks who yearn to emulate them.

Peter Savodnik describes the mentality of pro-Palestinian protesters who popped up about the same time at Cal Poly Humboldt, nestled in the redwoods in Northern California as follows:

They alluded to a Kent State–like showdown.  They thought it was them versus the American Empire, and they envisioned taking part in a grand decolonization struggle that extended from Rafah to the Angolan diamond mines to the United States’ southern border to this little college town just south of the Oregon state line…

The Empire, however, soon struck back.

On May Day police moved in, arrested 31 protesters, and closed down the scene at Cal Poly Humboldt.  The “global” struggle had proven to be quite ephemeral, as has been the fate of most late spring college encampments.

In the past week both the numericity and fury of the campus protests have abated, if only because many of the same colleges are now holding graduation ceremonies, and students are dispersing, as they do routinely every year, to the four winds for the summer.

It is doubtful any of them will head toward Gaza.

But even if the actual, everyday temperature of protest is now cooling, the grandiosity of the claims about the significance of the insurgency is skyrocketing.

As a relatively recent article in The New York Times contends,

…the war is taking place in a land [students have] never set foot in, where those killed — 34,000 so far, according to local health authorities — are known to them only through what they have read or seen online. But for many, the issues are closer to home, and at the same time, much bigger and broader. In their eyes, the Gaza conflict is a struggle for justice, linked to issues that seem far afield. They say they are motivated by policing, mistreatment of Indigenous people, discrimination toward Black Americans and the impact of global warming.

Writing in the Verso blog plugging his own upcoming book about the climate crisis, Swedish professor of ecology Andreas Malm compares the current violence in Gaza with the defensive strategy (known as Plan Dalet) to thwart the invading Arab armies of 1948 bent on driving out the Jews in defiance of the United Nations resolution concerning partition.

He then adds that “destruction is the constitutive experience of Palestinian life because the essence of the Zionist project is the destruction of Palestine”.  

Malm thoroughly lionizes the Hamas terrorist attack on October 7 that kicked off the current “destruction” as not only strategically imperative but also, in keeping with his own abstract and personalized logic, thoroughly justified.  “Half a year has passed since the resistance launched Toufan al-Aqsa [“Al Aqsa Flood”] and the occupation responded by declaring and executing genocide.”

But Malm quickly leaves behind his exquisite ethical apoplexy about the “genocide” in Gaza, which he seems to trace back not only to the 19^th century but to historical fact of Judaism itself (a meme that is difficult to defend as anything other than blatant antisemitism), and moves abruptly to his larger totalizing form of Weltschmerz – the environmental crisis. 

“This time, unlike in 1948 or 1950,” he writes, “the destruction of Palestine is playing out against the backdrop of a different, but related process of destruction: namely, that of the climate system of this planet.”

Malm recounts the terrible Mediterranean tropical cyclone known as “Storm Daniel” that struck Libya in 2023 and contributed to the deaths of anywhere from 10,000 to 20,000 people, what he characterizes as “the most intense event of mass killing by climate change so far in the decade, possibly the century”.

Aside from the fact that no particular weather event (scientists tell us) can be blamed on climate change other than that the latter increases the probability of its occurrence in the first place, there have been numerous natural disasters in less than a century that top the number of lives lost in comparison with Storm Daniel.

In 2008 there were 70,000 deaths in China – and in 2005 in Kashmir 38,000 perished – from earthquakes, which no one has yet sought to blame on climate change. 

As recently as 1970 (just a little over a half century ago, but when global warming had not supposedly begun to accelerate) the monumental death toll in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) exceeded 300,000 as a result of Cyclone Bhola.

Yet Malm riffs continually throughout his essay on this theme of climate apocalypse as a mirror reflex of the devastation in Gaza.  “The destruction of Palestine and the destruction of the Earth play out in broad daylight. There is a surfeit of documentation of both.”

Yes, but what’s the causal relation?  In the initial paragraphs Malm doesn’t even imply the fallacy that correlation is causation, other than entreating you to meditate on the enormity of his vision of human annihilation with the insinuation perhaps that you will draw the connection somehow that it’s all the fault of the Jews.

But finally he does.

Much more could be said – and, thankfully, much superb work is now being produced – about the political ecology of the settler-colonial project in Palestine and the tendencies to destruction of local nature that inhere in Zionism. In Gaza, where it has been going on for decades that destruction has now reached apocalyptic proportions: the people who have not yet died from the bombs live in the wasteland of contaminated soil, undrinkable water, orchards and fields packed into dust, garbage and debris mixed in a hyper-polluted strip of land in which human life is being rendered impossible for the long term. Ecocide here fuse with genocide in a manner never seen before. 

This is raw, vicious, Nazi-grade antisemitism with its breathtaking generalities and gargantuan, demonizing tropes, and such polemics instantaneously and convulsively set off a violent chain reaction similar to that in a thermonuclear explosion where the long curated hothouse passions and political resentments of the coddled cognitive elites freely associate their multiplying existential dreads with every coding of abstract “oppression” they can possibly imagine in the big, bad universe bellowing outside the plexiglass shells of their hermetically sealed faux intellectual “safe spaces”.

They rage for a simple metonym that can serve as a “quilting point” (in the words of the famed French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan) at which they might succeed in threading it somehow altogether, and of course even with their polished, anti-authoritarian but petty mindsets they hit upon the perennial object of scorn to legitimate their insipidity and incoherence  – the Jew!

The Gaza War is nasty.  It might be even dismissed as obscene. It began with an equally nasty, obscene, and methodically savage attack by the little Nazis known as Hamas – it’s not an analogy, since they are real Nazis – on Jews in Israel, then spiraled into a well-orchestrated and leveraged campaign of antisemitic harassment and terror, as an extremely detailed and well-documented lawsuit on behalf of Jewish students in Virginia alleges.

There is little question the Israelis have compromised the laws of war and engagement in their military response to the events of Oct. 7, as did the British in Kenya as well as the Americans in Vietnam and Iraq.

But the burgeoning bland acquiescence on the part of our progressive neoliberal elites, especially the professoriate, to the smarmy canard that such actions meet the international legal definition of genocide and, therefore, the Jews – even 80-year-old grandmothers in the Bronx or 18-year-old freshman girls exiting a Passover gathering are collectively responsible somehow – with the implication that they are fair game for violence - is more monstrous and frightening than what happened in Germany during the 1930s.

What is even more monstrous is the tendency of these same elites, especially the young ones, to double down on their rage in pursuit of a misplaced moral purism and gaslight even the mildest resistance or skepticism concerning their Captain Ahab-like obsession with stopping the Gaza War, even if it entails, as Russell Douhat bluntly puts it, becoming “perfectly comfortable with supporting not just peaceful negotiation but a revolutionary struggle led by Islamist fanatics”.

As their rage intensifies, the stakes become ever more striking, and peer (if not provocateur) pressure will compel them not just talk the talk, but walk the walk with all the grisly consequences that might entail.

Even if there were a cease-fire in Gaza tomorrow, it would not at this point be anywhere enough for them.  Most of them would most likely now feel morally obliged to shove all their chips on the table for a final spin of the wheel in hopes that everything regarding not only 1948, but maybe even 1917, might be mystically and magically undone.

But here Old Gisor’s quip about their “will to godhead” comes into play.  The fantasy of remaking the world in the twinkling of an eye by simply shouting “solidarity” sufficiently loudly collides grimly and tragically with real history and the will of a real Deity who somehow lurks in the background of it all.

It is going to be an interesting summer.