Stop, Look, and Listen #3

A round-up of what I have been reading and listening to this week.

Banners from a Tel Aviv protest in October 2023, calling for both the return of Israeli hostages from Gaza, and an end to the recent round of hostilities (Anadolu Agency/Mostafa Alkharouf).

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This post is part of the newsletter’s ‘Stop, Look, and Listen’ series, a digest of articles and podcasts that I’ve found engaging and insightful over the past week.

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Responding to the war on Gaza

The relentless Israeli assault on Gaza has caused the death of more than 8,000 Palestinians this month; more than 1,400 Israeli citizens and foreign nationals have also been killed since October 7th, mostly in Hamas’s initial attack. There is a striking disjuncture between the popular outpouring of support for the Palestinian cause internationally, and the censoriously pro-Israel position taken by many Western governments and institutions – not to mention the declining opportunities for dissenting voices to be heard in Israel itself.

On the latest episode of Jewish Currents’ On The Nose podcast, editor-in-chief Arielle Angel discussed the isolation of the contemporary Israeli left with human rights lawyer Michael Sfard, grassroots activist Sally Abed, and historian Yair Wallach, and the question of how to build an anti-war and anti-occupation coalition in the current climate. Orly Noy, chair of the executive board of B’Tselem, The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, has sought to stake out such a position in a piece published in English in +972 Magazine.

Government ministers, army officials, and members of the public — including many identified with the leftist camp — are openly calling for the obliteration of Gaza and exacting an unprecedented price on its more than 2 million inhabitants. Whenever anyone objects, they are quick to respond defiantly: “What other choice do we have?”

Noy takes this question seriously, and answers it with a call for Israel to halt the cycle of violence, end its persecution of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, and allow the Palestinian political sphere to flourish.

Beyond Israel, Jewish artists, writers, and scholars in Germany have written an open letter, published in N+1, insisting on the need for freedom of expression, and challenging German government efforts to curtail the voicing of pro-Palestinian sentiment, highlighting the concerning racist undertones of such a policy. American journalist and author Jonathan M. Katz has also published a moving personal account of his journey away from Zionism and towards support for a single, multi-ethnic state in Israel-Palestine for his own newsletter, The Racket. And as Byron Clark has written for Feijoa Dispatch, the plight of Gaza has sparked particularly strong sympathy among citizens of Sarajevo, given their own experiences of besiegement and genocidal violence during the 1990s.

Extremism in US politics

In 1963, the historian Richard Hofstadter influentially identified the existence of a ‘paranoid style’ in American politics. Hofstadter’s hypothesis was debated by historians Adam Smith and Nick Witham on the latest episode of the Rothermere American Institute’s The Last Best Hope podcast, exploring both its origins and impact, and whether it remains a useful tool of academic analysis. One particular facet Hofstadter identified was an exaggerated concern with the activities of secret societies, and this tendency is also the subject of Colin Dickey’s Under the Eye of Power How Fear of Secret Societies Shapes American Democracy, which he discussed with Miranda Melcher on this recent episode of the New Books Network podcast.

While Hofstadter saw as a fundamentally irrational, spasmodic, and ultimately doomed tendency, epitomised at the time by Barry Goldwater’s heavily defeated campaign as Republican candidate in the 1964 presidential election, has today become the dominant form of rightist grassroots and electoral politics in the US. This has manifested clearly in the drawn-out election of a new Republican speaker of the House of Representatives, as illustrated by Don Moynihan in this piece for his Can We Still Govern? newsletter on Jim Jordan’s since failed bid for the role, and Chris Geidner exposing the still relatively unknown, eventually successful candidate Mike Johnson’s history of anti-democratic, anti-migrant, and anti-LGBTQ+ advocacy, in this post for his Law Dork newsletter.

How have far-right positions, including a commitment to derailing the functioning of government itself, become so ensconced in the Republican Party? In a recent appearance on Digging a Hole: The Legal Theory podcast, political scientist Daniel Ziblatt placed the blame on minoritarian aspects of the US constitution itself, which encourage and reward such behaviour. Yet it is also fundamentally a story of erosion of democratic norms, as historian Seth Cotlar highlighted in this post for his Rightlandia newsletter on the 1959 death of the Nazi sympathiser (and possible agent) Robert Edmonson. Cotlar’s superb piece emphasises the persistence of connected antisemitic, racist, and anti-communist strands in American far right thought since the Second World War, and how they went from being rightly identified as fascist to being increasingly tolerated.

Labour, migration, and exploitation

The struggle for workers’ rights and against state-sponsored or sanctioned racial discrimination are inseparable. This is illustrated in three excellent pieces of investigative journalism this week on the plight of migrant labour:

• Emiliano Mellino and Matthew Chapman, for The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, on the horrifying extent of exploitation, mistreatment, and racism inflicted upon migrant farm workers in the UK, and callously ignored by the Home Office.

• Taj Ali, for Tribune, on Palestinian workers reported missing in Israel since the latest escalation of violence there, and how this relates to their precarious position within the Israeli labour market more generally.

• Margaret Simons’ Guardian Long Read on the plight of Filipino domestic workers in London and elsewhere, detailing the exploitation and disregard meted out to them by the Filipino government, the governments of host countries, and employer families alike, but also the bravery and togetherness the workers have shown in standing up for their collective rights.

Trajectories of liberalism

I’ve also listened to three really engaging podcast episodes this week on intellectual histories of liberalism, locating its development as an ideology within the personal and professional milieus of its key thinkers and the global challenges they grappled with:

• Vikram Visana, interviewed for New Books Network about his book Uncivil Liberalism: Labour, Capital and Commercial Society in Dadabhai Naoroji’s Political Thought, and the way Naoroji drew on India’s colonial experience to challenge dominant British liberal conceptions of the workings of capitalism, in a manner that influenced Karl Marx and William Jennings Bryan, among others.

• An extended version of a recent episode of BBC Radio 4’s In Our Time, on which host Melvyn Bragg discussed John Maynard Keynes’s book The Economic Consequences of the Peace with Margaret MacMillan, Michael Cox, and Patricia Clavin, dedicating particular attention to the gap between Keynes’s economistic approach to international relations at the end of the First World War and the political realities underpinning the situation, and the extent to which the book sowed dissent with the outcome of the Paris Peace Conference.

• Scott Kamen, interviewed for New Books Network about his forthcoming book From Union Halls to the Suburbs: Americans for Democratic Action and the Transformation of Postwar Liberalism, and how American liberals sought to move on from the New Deal towards a greater focus on quality of life issues (and away from primarily material ones).

Economics of infrastructure

Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act has prompted an extensive debate as to how far it signifies a break with neoliberalism and towards a genuinely radical response to the climate crisis. Sandeep Vaheesan, legal director at the Open Markets Institute, steers something of a middle course on this question, as he explained on the latest episode of Money on the Left’s Superstructure podcast, drawing insights through comparison with the (inaptly named) Hoover Dam on the Colorado river, whose construction in the early 1930s prefigured Franklin D. Roosevelt’s more radical New Deal.

The relationship between neoliberalism and infrastructure (and possibilities of resistance to it) are also the subject of Sarah El-Kazaz’s book Politics in the Crevices: Urban Design and the Making of Property Markets in Cairo and Istanbul, as she discussed with marc Lynch on the latest episode of the POMEPS Middle East Political Science Podcast.

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