Slavoj Žižek is a Guardian commentator, philosopher and unreformed communist who has attributed the attacks of 9/11 to the “antagonisms of global capitalism”, and has argued that Hitler’s greatest sin was that he was “not radical enough” in that he didn’t “dare to disturb the basic structure of the modern capitalist social space”, adding that the Nazi dictator “was not violent enough…not ‘essential’ enough.”
He has also recently joined a growing list of Guardian and CiF columnists who have opined that the Jewish state should not exist.
Writing for British left-wing political magazine The New Statesman, in an essay titled “Israel’s best hope lies in a single state“, Žižek begins by characterizing the wish of Jews in Israel to marry within the faith as a sinister, intolerant, and irrational hatred towards “the other”, meant to maintain racial purity – a fantastical tale which mocks Israeli “Guardians of Jewish purity” and manages to conjure “vigilante-style patrols work[ing] to stop Arab men from mixing with local Jewish girls.” [emphasis mine]
In Žižek’s imaginary Middle East, Israelis (and certainly not Hamas, PFLP, and al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade) are the only real terrorists in the region: sinister political actors who – as anyone schooled in the dark history of Jewish malevolence in the world surely would not be surprised to know – are not above literally “poisoning” [Palestinian] water” wells.
The only just and final solution, according to Žižek, to this wretched nightmare named Israel is not a two-state solution but rather, to “abolish the apartheid [state] that exists” and replace it with one majority Arab state.
Žižek’s advocacy for the political destruction of the first sovereign Jewish polity in 2000 years should not be judged too harshly as, not unlike Mya Guarnieri, he’s clearly only trying to save Jews from themselves, to save – as Guarnieri so subtly put it – “Judaism’s very soul“, and indeed closes by sagely moralizing to Zionists, these “Israeli defenders of Jewish purity”, that “they want to protect [Israel] so much that they are ready to forsake the very core of Jewish identity.”
Adam Kirsch, reviewing Žižek’s book, In Defense of Lost Causes, for The New Republic, observed that to Žižek:
“Jews are a mere abstraction, objects of fantasy and speculation, that can be forced to play any number of roles in his psychic economy.”
Thus, it’s indeed very likely that his philosophical musings on the moral failings of Jews, and the moral necessity of the Jewish state’s demise, will continue to be welcomed at the Guardian.
