Slavoj Zizek
LJUBLJANA – These are crazy times. Biblical disturbances in nature, such as the repeated torrential rain in Dubai or the mass fish die-off in Vietnam’s overheated reservoir, seem to mirror our overheated politics and social environment.
At such moments, it is crucial to keep a cool head and analyze all the weird phenomena as closely, objectively, and dispassionately as possible. And few phenomena nowadays are weirder than the protests surrounding Israel’s bombardment and invasion of Gaza in response to Hamas’s terrorist attack last October.
We should acknowledge the rhetoric from some politicized Muslims, such as those who recently demonstrated in Hamburg, Germany, chanting “Kalifat ist die Lösung” (“Caliphate is the solution”). And we should concede that, despite the massive presence of Jews among the protesters, there are at least a few true anti-Semites among them (just as there are some genocidal maniacs in Israel).
While many commentators have noted the parallel between today’s pro-Palestinian demonstrations and the 1968 student protests against the Vietnam War, the Italian philosopher Franco Berardi points to an important difference. Rhetorically, at least, the 1968 protesters explicitly identified with the anti-imperialist Viet Cong position and a broader, positive socialist project, whereas today’s protesters very rarely identify with Hamas, and instead are “identifying with despair.”
As Berardi puts it: “Despair is the psychological and also cultural trait that explains the wide identification of young people with the Palestinians. I think that the majority of the students today........