The New Cancel Culture

Slavoj Zizek, "Cancelling Palestine"

Current debates about Israeli policy are rife with double standards, leading to absurd decisions like Germany’s recent cancellation of a pro-Palestinian gathering. By quashing legitimate speech and assembly, an Israel-aligned establishment risks inciting precisely the kind of anti-Semitism that it wants to prevent.

LJUBLJANA – It is only April, but we already have a good candidate for photo of the year. On April 12, German police shut down a Palestine Congress that was set to take place in Berlin, and among those arrested was Udi Raz, a devout Jew with a red yarmulke. In photos and videos of the incident, one can clearly see the smirking aggression on the faces of the policemen – reminiscent of their forebears in the 1930s – as they drag away a Jew.

Among those swept up in the ongoing struggle against anti-Semitism in Germany, many are Jews. The Palestine Congress itself was a joint initiative of the Berlin-based organization Jüdische Stimme für Gerechten Frieden in Nahost (Jewish Voice for a Just Peace in the Middle East) and the pan-European political movement and party DiEM25, whose top figure is Yanis Varoufakis. Yet the German Ministry of the Interior has now banned Varoufakis not only from entering the country, but even from online participation in any political activities there.

Varoufakis is fully justified in claiming that, with this ban, the German government has crossed the line into authoritarian behavior. Worse, the German political establishment – including even the Greens and Die Linke (The Left) – have supported the move, reflecting the breadth of the new anti-anti-Semitic cancel culture. To be sure, similar incidents are occurring in the United States, where, for example, Hobart and William Smith Colleges recently placed political theorist Jodi Dean on leave, after she published an essay discerning an emancipatory potential in Hamas’s October 7 attack. But Germany represents an extreme case of how the establishment has appropriated cancel culture.

To dispel any suspicion that Varoufakis might have delivered an anti-Semitic speech at the Palestine Congress, one can simply read his prepared remarks. The text unambiguously condemns any form of anti-Semitism, and demands only that the same standards be applied to both sides in the conflict.

On April 13, CNN reported that, “Hundreds of Israeli settlers surrounded Palestinian villages and attacked residents across the occupied West Bank … after an Israeli boy who had gone missing from a settlement was found dead.” Let’s call these attacks by their proper name: mob lynchings. Far from a normal police investigation, the Israel Defense Forces have simply allowed vigilantism to prevail. One can only imagine how the enlightened West would react if it had been hundreds of Palestinians attacking Israeli settlements after a Palestinian boy went missing.

Or consider another case: On January 18, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu rejected the idea of a Palestinian state and promised that Israel would control the entire region it currently occupies: “And therefore I clarify that in any other arrangement, in the future, the state of Israel has to control the entire area from the river to the sea.” Netanyahu’s use of “from the river to the sea” has come under particular scrutiny, and for good reason. When Palestinians or anyone on the left have used the same phrase to demand a free Palestine (as in the popular chant: “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”), those on the right have disingenuously argued that they are calling for the death of all Jewish people in Israel.

In short, a phrase that is denounced as genocidal when Palestinians use it is now being used by Netanyahu. The formula “from the river to the sea” represents what Israel is actually doing and planning to do, but would never publicly admit to doing, until now – when the Israeli prime minister himself turns it into an obscenity.

I could go on with these examples. On April 2, Netanyahu called the airstrike that killed seven aid workers in Gaza a “tragic case of our forces unintentionally hitting innocent people.” How, then, would he describe the deaths of thousands of Palestinian children at the hands of Israel’s forces?

The house of cards is falling. Previously, Israel at least pretended to follow two rules: criticism of Israeli policies is permissible, but anti-Semitism is not; and the bombing of Gaza is directed at Hamas, which itself terrorizes ordinary Palestinians, not at Gaza’s entire population. Lately, however, these distinctions have collapsed. Netanyahu has openly stated in interviews that in cases where direct anti-Semitism is not allowed, criticism of Israel has taken its place. Likewise, many senior Israeli officials have become increasingly open in equating Gaza with Hamas.

According to Israel’s hardline finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, over 70% of Israelis support the idea of “encouraging voluntary immigration,” because “two million people [in Gaza] wake up every morning with the desire to destroy the State of Israel.” (If this is the case, perhaps it has something to do with the indiscriminate Israeli bombing of Gaza.) The implication is that all Gazans are legitimate targets – and it is clear that the West Bank is next.

Given this, the oft-repeated argument that Israel cannot really eliminate Hamas misses the point. For Israel, the true goal of the war is to absorb Gaza and the West Bank: a Greater Israel, from the river to the sea. Until then, Israel needs to be able to claim that Hamas remains a threat, to justify continued military intervention.

The gap between elite and popular opinion in Western developed countries, as well as in some Arab countries (such as Egypt, Jordan, and Morocco), has grown too wide to be papered over. While governments basically support Israel, their citizens can only protest – and, increasingly, be canceled, threatened, and even arrested for it. The danger I see is that if popular dissatisfaction explodes, it will take the form of anti-Semitism. That is why acts like Germany’s cancellation of the Palestine Congress should be recognized for what they are: a new perverted chapter in the history of anti-Semitism.