A Book Called Fascism or Genocide That’s Reluctant to Discuss Either

Barkan both consistently condemns the savagery of the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack and disavows the violence that Israel has wreaked on Palestinians since then, making clear that the response was imbalanced. But he positions Hamas’s actions as though they arose out of nowhere and not after decades of Israeli subjugation, displacement, ethnic cleansing, and untold crimes against humanity. Some people, myself included, would say that the genocide of Palestinians began at the tail end of 1947 with the Nakba—a word that does not appear in Barkan’s book—and that the 2006 election of a radicalized government such as Hamas and the attacks of October 7 were unsurprising results of a legacy of oppression. Barkan never mentions that Hamas has long been funded by the Israeli government, nor that the 2006 election, a contest that was
urged by George W. Bush, caused Israel to punish the Gaza Strip with a blockade that has led to innumerable deaths from starvation, water shortages, and lack of medical supplies, as well as the devastation of Gaza’s economy: Poverty rates had soared to 61.6 percent at the start of 2023, compared to 40 percent in 2005. Barkan quotes a conservative toll of Gazan casualties since October 7 (30,000 by the ides of March, 2024), although this figure was widely reported—long before this book went to press and even by news sources that activists deride for their bias toward Israel—as a significant undercount. “I grieve for the civilians Hamas slaughtered,” Barkan tells us. “But I grieve, too, for civilians slaughtered everywhere, and I struggle to care more about one foreign country over another.” Why not just write that he grieves also for Palestinians? What’s with this All Lives Matter prattle?

Barkan’s reluctance to engage with the specific atrocities of the genocide in Gaza is especially odd because he has a track record as a commentator of conscience. Barkan has long been a critic of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, and he left a job at The Observer in apparent protest of its editor in chief Ken Kurson, who helped write a 2016 speech for Trump, then running for his first presidential term, to deliver to AIPAC. In a slightly older world, Barkan could align himself more comfortably with the progressive wing of the Democratic Party—at least, without constantly codifying his own politics with respect to his Jewish identity. Israel’s recent actions changed all that, and in a cringey, memoiristic chapter titled “Israel,” his irritation with this shifted discourse becomes self-pitying. Barkan wants us to know that he is not responsible for the predicament of Palestinians:

Again and again, people like me have been forced to answer for a nation that we are not bound to in any meaningful way; I have never visited Israel and I’m not sure I ever will. To ask an American Jew to account for Israel is not so different than demanding an answer from them for the ongoing crisis in Sudan.

Some anti-Zionist Jews are wary of discussing Palestinian suffering in terms of its relationship to their ethnic and religious background, yet for different reasons. My Jewish diasporic identity spurred me, years ago, to learn more about Israel’s occupation and to denounce its treatment of Palestinians, an awakening shared by many Jewish allies in the pro-Palestine movement. Still, we understand that framing a devastatingly lopsided conflict within one’s Jewish experience is to forefront a group that is already front and center. (There is no shortage of Jewish journalists in America covering Palestine, while Palestinian and Muslim journalists have lost their jobs or have been suspended thanks to the perception that they are incapable of reporting on daily slaughter without bias.) While Barkan dismisses identity politics elsewhere, here he deploys them to express how he’s been put upon as a Jew. In the end, it feels oh-so American to act annoyed when nudged to consider one’s relationship to the wider world.