‘Total Ideologies’ Are Preventing Palestinians and Israelis From Making Peace
Demagogic discourse is causing each side to dehumanize the other and resort to violence
Dear Readers:
In a preface to an UnPopulist commentary on the Israeli-Palestinian crisis last week, Editor-in-Chief Shikha Dalmia wrote, “It is rare to find individuals who can openly criticize their own side while remaining its advocate and at the same time approach the other with understanding and empathy. And it is rarer still to find individuals who can perform such a tough balancing act on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”
She was referring specifically to two of our authors. The first is Rabbi Michael G. Holzman, whose essay that day discussed the “subrational” impulses driving each side in the conflict. As she observed, Holzman’s piece “pull[ed] no punches in taking the other side to task for its transgressions and cruelty—but also confront[ed] his own side with bitter truths.”
Today, The UnPopulist publishes the second author she was alluding to: Khaled Al-Kassimi, an assistant professor of political science and international relations at the American University of the Emirates. In today’s essay, Professor Al-Kassimi discusses the deadly influence of “total ideologies” on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, lamenting the ideologies’ impact on “the sociopolitical relations between the two peoples” and even on “the academic discourse over that conflict.”
Al-Kassimi’s criticisms of both antagonists’ partisans are, like Holzman’s, direct—yet he calls repeatedly for compassion and understanding. For a perspective seldom heard in the U.S. on the problems plaguing Israeli-Palestinian relations, read on.
Tom Shull
Editor-at-Large
Oct. 7 highlighted the moral bankruptcy of ideologies that have for decades claimed the know-how of "liberation" and the political alchemy for "decolonization." Regardless of whose side you are on in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, Oct. 7, 2023, should be seen as a macabre curtain call for both sides’ total ideological worldviews.
The Oxford Handbook of Political Ideologies defines a total ideology as “a global conception of life and of history which postulates the social essence of man and subordinates the individual to the collective.” Put differently, total ideologies are invisible glasses that systematically distort our perception of the social world, which is full of individuals who don’t conform to collective stereotypes. They are also the glasses we may force people to wear when their personal worldview contradicts our own.
Total ideologies are ultimately based on taking some concept out of creation’s totality, raising it above that creation, and making the latter revolve around and serve it. They assume that this idolized part of the whole has the capacity to save us from some real or perceived evil; they are, by definition, idolatrous.
In the case of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, this involves the idolatry—on both sides—of liberation and justice, and of violence as a means to those ends. This total ideology has proved deadly to the sociopolitical relations between the two peoples and even to academic discourse over that conflict—in other words, deadly to the truth itself. Life and truth will continue to suffer in the Holy Land as long as these total ideologies distort our views.
The Hubris of Total Ideology: Palestinian and Israeli
Take for instance the ideology of the Iranian-led “Axis of Resistance,” which includes Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthi movement and other Iranian-financed Mideast militia groups. The axis’s ideology emphasizes such themes such as “freedom” from the West and “armed struggle” against Israel and America. The axis’s rhetoric stresses victimization, blaming all the ills of the world on the West, while the axis’s actions seek to undermine the sovereignty of Arab countries who have relations with the U.S. or Israel.
Such an ideology is essentially a worldview that was never—and could never—be inclusionary. It creates its own enemies. Its messianic worldview and impolitic solutions, which elevate justice, liberation and violence above all the other ends and means available to us, now threaten with chaos more and more countries, including Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and others that have allies like the U.S. and are at odds with the axis’s ideological posturing.
Yet the past few months have revealed that the proponents of "Palestinian liberation" have only pushed their cause backward by reifying the ideologies of Marxism and nationalism, which have severed the spirituality of Islam and emphasized emotional rhetoric for ideological gains while disregarding the long-term necessity to plan and organize political gains. The late Pakistani political scientist Dr. Eqbal Ahmad recognized how the Palestinians’ fixation on liberation through total military destruction undermined their ability to deploy military resistance strategically, and as he aptly stated:
Armed struggle was supremely unsuited to the Palestinian condition. ... Armed struggle is less about arms and more about organization. ... A successful armed struggle proceeds to out-administer the adversary and not out-fight him. And that the task of out-administration was a task of out-legitimizing the enemy. ... Out-administration occurs when you identify the primary contradiction of your adversary and expose that contradiction not only to yourselves, which you don’t need to do so much, but to the world at large, and more importantly, to the people of the adversarial country itself.
This brings us to the total ideology of Palestinians’ adversary, Israel. The primary, indeed tragic, contradiction within Zionism has been between its moral justification of wishing to liberate, emancipate, give a home to, and guarantee the prosperity of the Jews, one of the most long-suffering and discriminated-against minorities in history, and its subsequent subjugating, disenfranchising, expelling and impoverishing the Arab-Palestinians, the indigenous group that had done no harm to the Jewish people before the establishment of the state of Israel. Zionism, like other total ideologies, has elevated liberation, justice and violence in pursuit of its goals at the expense of the welfare of others. This tragic paradox is more than a choice the Zionist movement made and must live with; it is a self-contradiction in its very essence and moral foundation.
Both the Zionist’s and axis’s ideologies adopt an exclusionary ideological discourse, one that appeals to chaos, emotions and instincts, and that recycles talking points and cliches that further divide their two peoples, rather than uniting them for a common moral solution. Their public presentations appeal to pathos rather than logos—a pervasive quality of total ideologues.
Demagoguery Over Dialogue
This pathos has invaded our places of learning as well. It is apt to recall that Plato’s Academy held sacred groves of olive trees that furnished olive oil as a prize for the lovers of wisdom (i.e., philosophers). Palestinians, above all others, should appreciate this prize, since they see the olive tree as a source of sustenance and a symbol of their resistance against Israel.
Yet Plato is remembered, whether in his Dialogues or The Republic, for having emphasized that dialogos—i.e., dialogue—is characterized by the quality of persuasion through logos, while demagogos—i.e., demagoguery—reverts to foul rhetoric through compulsion. That is, the former engages with the audience using ethical discourse, aiming to uplift all interlocutors, while the latter places emphasis on emotional rhetoric, swaying the uninformed audience for its own egoistic gains.
Many academic campuses in the West, judging by the manners of some of their students, are not interested in a moral, inclusionary solution celebrating both sides, Israeli and Palestinian, as human beings, but rather in articulating empty rhetoric. They leave the audience wondering whether these speakers are celebrating violence and are aware their rhetoric is essentially an exercise in demagoguery. How can someone take the speaker seriously when they are only highlighting the death of Palestinians and not even considering the deaths of Israelis on Oct. 7 and that the people in Israel are also victims of a total ideology called Zionism? Is it not the responsibility of the speaker to not leave the audience wondering whether the speaker is elevating the life of a Palestinian over an Israeli? Should you not be compassionate when speaking to your supposed adversary, especially since compassion is the ethos of the saints and prophets who walked the Holy Land? Why such a pompous stance when you are supposedly defending the truth? No truth has been internalized through shouting, interruption and slander.
Arabian Tragedies
In making this criticism, I am in no way seeking to undermine the catastrophe that has occurred in Arabia since Oct. 7. Even then, however, we must recognize that the Arab world has witnessed several "Gazas" since Sept. 11—in Iraq, Libya, Lebanon, Yemen, Sudan and Syria, among other countries, with casualties surpassing, according to my own research, 7 million dead due to ideological conflict, some of it involving the West, and some of it regional. We cannot expect everyone to be distressed by these deaths and see them from our perspective; this assumption is a shortcut to psychological disenchantment. Moreover, the death of innocent civilians rarely results from the actions of just one side, even if ideologues and demagogues would want us to think otherwise. The past seven months have revealed the ills of the heart in many people who claim to be defending “freedom” and “justice,” whether they are on the side of the Palestinians or the Israelis, in their failure to acknowledge their own side’s role in the tragic deaths that occurred on Oct. 7 and since. This psychosocial polluted heart has also disclosed itself in the dehumanizing way proponents of Palestine and Israel have dealt with each other, whether online, in gatherings or in academic milieus.
What has happened in Gaza has happened historically to many regions of the world. According to the total ideologues, though, this calamity is different because it is in the Holy Land: the land of the prophets and of our blessed Mother Mary (peace be upon her).
Passion Without Compassion
But those ideologues not only lack the ethos of compassion of such historical archetypes; their policy for ending subjugation is categorically incompetent. I, like others, have witnessed in the past few months academics and students engaging in the most unethical forms of discussion by claiming the "high ground," since they are "from Palestine," or Arab or Muslim. They are even reverting to personal anecdotes, thus affirming not a compassionate position, but a self-centered position. A person who genuinely seeks a dialogue need not resort to reminding people of their own history, and if they do, it shouldn’t be with the goal of dehumanizing the interlocutor, but rather to inform them of what they may not know. In the Holy Quran, it says, "You surely cannot guide whoever you like, ... but it is Allah Who guides whoever He wills, and He knows best who are fit to be guided." Similarly, in the Holy Bible, it says, "Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths, but only what is helpful for building others up according to their needs, that it may benefit those who listen."
It seems that some intellectuals have lost the art of persuasion, and this is trickling down through the university to students and online “experts.” They now demand everyone be aware of the "Palestinian Struggle" by appealing to desire and prejudice rather than rational argument based on dialogue and compassion. If a person is not aware, then teach them. Reverting to name-calling, such as "white," "racist," "settler," "colonial sympathizer," "traitor," "imperialists," etc., simply shows your ego is not willing to comprehend that it is the nature of the temporal world to have people disagree with you. Such abuse and debased language are detrimental to the social cohesion of any society, especially to a community struggling for justice. A human being is not required to have lived under oppression or have people in their family die for them to comprehend injustice; this postmodern ethos claiming “I am right, you are wrong” because I lived through oppression comes from an agonized individual who is, ironically, trying to dominate the person in front of them.
While there are many victims of oppression, it is unwise to self-victimize, as Muslim American scholar Hamza Yusuf reminds us; rather, harmonizing reason and revelation would suggest self-criticism, compassion, forgiveness and gratitude—a philosophical and theological virtue. While mitigating injustices is necessary, continuous ingratitude and an obsession for earthly justice is an uphill road to discontentment.
In universities, students lack knowledge that would allow them to cope with and address political and social crises with ethical considerations. Instead, social science students have been equipped with postmodern theories—for example, postcolonialism or critical race theory—that are, to paraphrase California-based Muslim scholar Dr. Ali Ataie, form over substance—more about attitude than truth. These theories fetishize ideological idols like absolute justice, liberation and freedom because they reject metanarratives, objective morality and objective truth. More dangerously, these theories result in students’ having no deference to learning or their instructors, since according to these theories, “All opinion is knowledge,” ethics is a “social construct,” and “subjective truths” rather than “objective truth” are the markers of wisdom. “Critical” academics and their students become morally egocentric, applying exclusively subjective intuitions to questions that clearly demand solutions and behavior located beyond the corporeal ego. Postmodern theories construct a generation of students who pursue an ad hominem politics of power, rather than the art of realistically possible moral solutions to sociopolitical crises.
Seeing the World As It Is
Most Arabs, including academics and students, are not proponents of armed struggle, nor are those interested in the flourishing of Palestine and the Arab states. Several recent and upcoming international conferences, including academic seminars, recognize that total ideologies have retarded Arab societies’ coming to terms with, and overcoming, Zionism, and that the most pragmatic method to succeed against any nationalist ideology is not violence. The Axis of Resistance’s fanaticism blinds them to the historical fact that “armed struggle” has only benefited Zionism as an ideology.
Arab governments, in contrast, have refrained from addressing the Palestinian cause with total ideology. Even the late Yasser Arafat, arguably the most important and famous Palestinian revolutionary leader and founder of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, gave up armed struggle as early as the 1990s. More recently, it was the Arab League, including the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, that agreed in November 2023 at the Joint Arab Islamic Extraordinary Summit in Riyadh that South Africa would bring forth a case against Israel at the International Court of Justice. Further, the Arab Group at the United Nations, with the help of several foreign ministers from the global North and global South, advanced a ceasefire resolution in Gaza. The Arab Group and the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation also supported the Palestinian Authority’s application for U.N. membership.
The actions of Hamas fighters on Oct. 7 and the exclusionary discourse used by their leaders may be understandable sociologically or psychologically given the trauma of their oppression and subjugation. Understanding is not condoning, however. What Hamas did is a war crime and violates International Humanitarian Law. Hamas leaders will be judged, whether in a temporal court or in the court of the Almighty in the hereafter. They will be judged for their incompetent decisions not only on Oct. 7, but in recent decades—decisions that played a huge role in the destruction of Gaza. Yes, the Israel Defense Forces are committing and have committed war crimes there; however, Hamas and its self-centered Axis-of-Resistance ideology provided the current nationalist-extremist Israeli government with a much-needed excuse to rejuvenate a right-wing nationalist ideology that had been in decline during, for example, the Oslo peace process. The axis’s violent methods also allowed Israeli politicians to ignore the nonviolent means of engagement that the Arab League was advancing in collaboration with Fatah, the BRICS, and other United Nations General Assembly countries. This process could have brought momentous results for the Palestinians.
Ultimately, a one-state solution is the remedy for the political and social violence that has engulfed Palestine and Israel. A two-state solution will only reinforce ideological nationalism and the future generational hatred the Oslo accords sought to extinguish, with a quasi-two-state solution as a first step. However, then as now, it was total ideological axis groups that slandered supportive Arab leaders Yasser Arafat, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and King Hussein bin Talal as “traitors,” “pro-Zionists,” and “colonial sympathizers.” Former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who negotiated the accords, was assassinated by a Zionist ideologue. Now these ideologues who saw Oslo as a threat to their ideology claim that it failed.
Escaping the Trap of Total Ideologies
Writer Arthur Martine, in Martine’s Hand-Book of Etiquette, and Guide to True Politeness, counseled in 1866: “Let your aim be to come at truth, not to conquer your opponent. So you never shall be at a loss in losing the argument and gaining a new discovery.” Of course, this isn’t what happens most of the time in the modern world, especially when we deploy the sword of our righteousness from behind the comfortable shield of the keyboard or behind the volume of our voice and a condescending tone.
This form of “criticism”—which is really a menace, rather than a response—is not the approach of a person who is really interested in revealing the truth or engaging in a meaningful dialogue based on compassion. Rather, it is a one-way conversation exposing the ills of the heart. Only an inward re-evaluation can resolve it; no amount of protest, no amount of shouting, no number of posts on Instagram or X can remedy the problem. An inward re-evaluation free from total-ideological noise should come to the conclusion that not everyone in Israel is a totalistic Zionist; indeed, Jews, Christians and Muslims in Israel have for decades been contesting Zionism as a total ideology, including protesters seeking the removal from power of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his nationalist ideological government prior to Oct. 7.
Total ideologies, through their distortion of the world, put us in continual conflict with the world as it is. It is no surprise that death and a loss of wisdom are the result. We thus have a responsibility to convert total ideologies’ pathos of hatred into friendship, committing ourselves to defending the dignity of all human beings across the world, irrespective of religion, ideology and race.
© The UnPopulist 2024
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Thank you for this excellent piece!
You bring up one reason the present conflict is so frustrating - namely, it did not have to be this way! The peace process that appeared to be viable in the 90s offered a different path, and there were many regular people and some courageous leaders on both sides who wanted to take it. But both Hamas and the Netanyahu coalition represent, in their own ways, the hardliners who REJECTED that peace process and wanted it to fail. (In some cases they represent this pretty personally - as a young far-right rioter, Itamar Ben-Gvir publicly threatened Yitzhak Rabin weeks before another right-wing zealot assassinated him). Peace, after all, would require giving up elements of the hardliners' maximalist visions. Ultimately they decided that was unacceptable, and now here we are. We're living in the world the hardliners chose, and it is horrific. And to *actually achieve* the maximalist goals of either side's hard-core ideologues would take orders of magnitude MORE bloodshed than we have seen in these recent months.
I don't know exactly what the diplomatic resolution to this conflict looks like - Nobel Peace Prizes have been given for less complex negotiations than this. But I do think a lasting peace that brings self-determination and security to Israelis and Palestinians alike should be our North Star. And I know that whatever that peace process looks like, it will require compromise to win out over maximalism. I think once peace is made (God willing!) people will find it a significant improvement on the status quo, and it will be obvious in hindsight that making those compromises was worth it.
Thank you everyone for your comments.