From Israel to America, liberals need to understand what losing means

Sometimes there is no way back

Well, I finally went and did it. In the guise of a writing about the US elections, raised my head slightly above the parapet and revealed a little about what I think about events in Israel right now. Yet still I hedge my bets and leave terms like ‘liberal’ undefined, just in case I need a get-out clause. Be gentle with me….

I have absolutely no idea what the outcome of the US elections will be. At the time of writing, polling seems to show a tipping of the scales towards Harris.

But what is certain that even a clear Harris victory at the ballot box will not be the end of the matter. Even in the best circumstances, we will not be able to say that the immediate danger from Trump will have passed for weeks or months. And even if Harris is firmly ensconced in the White House by the end of January, even if Trump never runs for President again, the anti-democratic wave he unleashed will not easily abate.

One thing I think I do know though - and absolutely dread - is how the mainstream of the Democratic Party and its supporters will approach the 2028 elections if Trump wins in 2024: The campaign won't look very different to this one, or indeed to campaigns at elections going back decades.

There will be flags, there will be inspirational speeches, there will be big name supporters, there will be optimism, there will be invocations of the sacred value of democracy, there will be hope.

Sure, there will certainly be an edge to the rhetoric. There will be anger at the suffering, corruption and chaos that Trump and the Republicans will have caused. In states with rampant Republican electoral malfeasance there will even be heroic attempts to push back, to get out the vote despite everything.

But in the mainstream of the Democratic Party there won't be any open acknowledgement of what will undeniably be true: The fix will be in, there will be little no hope of victory, the US will no longer a country with free elections. In fact, there may be no way back and no amount of invoking Old Glory and the country's better founding ideals will be change that.

While it's true that I can't be completely certain that Trump will have ended the democratic experiment once and for all, I am certain that, should he do so, the liberal centre of American politics will not concede they have been beaten. How do I know this? Because I have been watching the same liberal refusal to abandon hope in another country and it's been painful to watch.

That country is Israel, and the liberals I am referring to in this case include Israelis and also Jewish liberal Zionists outside Israel - the mainstream of my own British Jewish community and many others, including the US.

It's extraordinary to remember that, in the months preceding October 7 2023, a broad swathe of liberal-to-left opinion both in Israel and Diaspora was preoccupied with fighting back against the democratic emergency caused by Netanyahu's proposed judicial reforms. In the UK, there were vigils and public protests whose attendees included those who were passionate Zionists who had never criticised Israel in public before. That is how worried many were.

And now?

The post October 7th era hasn't necessarily changed how Diaspora liberal Zionists see Netanyahu (for example, 65% of British Jews strongly disapprove of him). But, as in Israel itself, the dominant opinion is that this the country is faced with a war of no choice, against Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran. While the fact that Netanyahu is leading this war may be distasteful and concerning, it doesn't change the necessity to ensure that the horrors of October 7th 2023 can never be repeated. In this view, this is Israel's war, not the government's.

One of the defining features of Diaspora liberal Zionism has always been a bifurcation between Israel as imperfect reality and Israel as it could be. To a degree, that is a feature of liberal democracy more generally; the state demands patriotism but the government doesn't. Perhaps that's the genius of such a system; you might lose an election but the future is still open. The liberal democratic state is a state in a constant state of becoming, with everything to play for.

For many years one of Netanyahu's greatest skills was to keep the Zionist future open even for those who opposed him. He may have caveated the possibility of a two-state solution almost to death, but never to the point of total extinction. Likewise, those on the right who dreamed of annexations and expulsions could keep the flame of hope very much alive.

October 7th and Netanyahu's desire to stay out of prison have dramatically and publicly closed the off-ramps towards a liberal Zionist future. His government is no longer a temporarily expedient coalition designed to ensure judicial reform; it is a government that has it's feet under the table, having lasted far longer than anyone expected. Smotrich and Ben-Gvir have empowered the settlement movement to the point where anti-Palestinian pogroms on the West Bank and creeping annexation may no longer be containable by any future government. The line between da facto annexation and de jure annexation is barely visible anymore.

And then there's the war.

No one, liberal or not, is denying that Gazans are suffering and dying to an unprecedented degree. Liberal opinion, in Israel and outside it, may be horrified at what is happening and may even believe that Netanyahu no longer has any interest in the hostages or any grand strategy. What remains normative is a sense that, at least up to now, there has been no alternative to at least attempting to destroy Hamas, even if the costs to Gazans is terrible. And given that Hezbollah has made much of northern Israel uninhabitable, there seems no alternative to taking on Iran's proxies and Iran itself.

Military action can be a unifying force in any country and particularly so in a country where military service has long been seen as both a duty and a democratic imperative. It is easy for liberal Israelis and liberal Zionists abroad to see the current war as the IDF's war, as the people's war. There is no appetite to address a hard truth: This war is defined by Netanyahu and his government. It cannot be seen as separate to his wider agenda. The principles behind it cannot be 'rescued' from his clutches.

At the moment, it is impossible to see a future for Gaza that, even if it doesn't include mass expulsion followed by Jewish settlement and annexation (which many in the government would support), would allow Palestinians even a token amount of agency. The most likely eventuality may well be forcibly - through murder and expulsion - corralling the population into a small area of the Gaza strip and 'allowing' them to live totally dependant on aid.  This will not be the kind of occupation that Israel has been used to and that liberal Zionists could convince themselves was a temporary measure. At least for the moment, there is no future for Gaza that is even remotely compatible with liberal democracy.

One's own pain can make it difficult to look into someone else's abyss. As ever, Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, sections of the far-left and antisemites everywhere have assisted Netanyahu and the Israeli right by traumatising Israeli and Diaspora liberals into accepting the politics of no alternative. Whether or not the term genocide when applied to Gaza is warranted, there is no doubt that the widespread use of the term has intimidated many Jews and Israelis into suppressing their horror at what Gazans are facing.

Liberal Zionism has, for decades, been predicated on an insistence that liberal democracy remained viable even while the occupation continued. To a degree, that was true. Even if you think that occupation may morally degrade the country that practices it, many countries have managed to erect 'firewalls' between anti-democratic regimes in one territory they control and democratic ones in the metropolitan 'centre' (like the British in India did for example). But  there are limits. Gaza, permanently ravaged, will be too visible and too embarrassing to ignore. And those on the Israeli right for whom the war has represented a fantastic opportunity are certainly uninterested in maintaining a cordon sanitaire between 'here' and 'there'. The project of expulsion and settlement is part of a wider project that will not stop at the green line. Itamar Ben Gvir's work as Minister for National Security has empowered menacing policing at impeccably liberal demonstrations, and that is just the start.

How could a liberal future have even a chance of survival under such conditions? The desperate liberal faith that the nightmare Israel is inflicting on Palestinians has some necessary purpose depends on faith that the Israeli government as it exists now cannot permanently create facts on the ground, whether in Gaza or within the 'green line'. Liberal Zionism has made itself acutely vulnerable by insisting that history is always open and government is always transitory. Liberal Zionists have spent so much time rebutting accusations of Israeli apartheid, ethnic cleansing and genocide, that they have forgotten that, to a state, all things are possible and some changes are permanent. 

This is the point where liberalism - and not just liberal Zionism - departs from reason and pragmatism towards an almost mystical faith in time: Nothing is ever that urgent, nothing is ever truly lost. There are emergencies but somehow the bill never becomes due. Liberal democracy is a kind of modern mean to which history will always return to over time.

Such an attitude leaves liberals acutely vulnerable to those who understand time more realistically. One of the reasons why the settlement project (in the West Bank at least) succeeded to the point where evacuation is now unthinkable, is that those who supported it knew that if you kicked the can down the road long enough, it would be too late to do anything to stop the process once set in train. And if the possibility of action ever truly became serious, all it took was some judiciously applied violence from da facto Palestinian radical allies to stop the process in its track.

The same is true when it comes to climate change. Liberal governments around the world have recognised the problem since at least the 1990s. The response has been incremental change and attempts to reach international agreement, which is all very rational but ignores how, political cycles being what they are, when parties opposing climate action come to power, they will simply put the process into deep freeze at best. There was little recognition that action on climate change had to be irreversible if it was to be impervious to the actions of those seeking to stop it. And now here we are: Only near-revolutionary measures can stop us heading into disaster; liberal incrementalism can no longer work.

By temperament, I am an incrementalist. I know too much about the history of revolutions to be anything but cautious about the unintended consequences of radical change in a short timescale. However, I also cannot ignore that some situations are so desperate that only radical action can allow us to avoid disaster. That's particularly true when facts are being created on the ground. Sometimes there is no choice but to act radically.

I am also someone who believes it is possible to lose. I have absolutely no reason to believe that the arc of history is inevitably going to bend in my direction. Some possibilities may be lost forever. Sometimes the bad guys win.

For these reasons and others, I have never really been a liberal. For all that left politics is rife with its own problems, it usually avoids the terrible vulnerability to time that bedevils liberalism. Sometimes there is no alternative but to recognise the urgency of the task and to sweep things away.

I hope that, when it comes to Israel or a Trumpian USA, liberals can have the strength to confront loss. Doing so will require abandoning the bifurcation between the state as an idea and the state as it actually exists. It makes no sense to long for the wheel of democracy to turn in your favour when your opponents have either prevented it from turning or are creating facts on the ground that a new government couldn't change.

However much US Democrats are raising the spectre of fascism in this campaign, I am almost certain that, should Trump accede to the Presidency they will fight the next election as if it were still being held in a democratic country. There is no plan B. Likewise, when I have asked liberal Zionists what the plan is if the West Bank is annexed without giving Palestinians equal rights - apartheid in other words - the answer is usually that there is no plan.

But perhaps there can be a different sort of plan, one predicated on having lost, one that finds a kind of paradoxical hope in hopelessness. That plan can be to resist.

Resistance is a concept that is too often monopolised by the radical left and right. For liberals, resistance is usually something that should be done 'elsewhere' (outside of the liberal democratic world) or has been done in the past in order to form liberal democratic polities. The time is approaching when resistance may need to be 'brought home'.

I think I could sign up to a resistant liberalism as it might address one of the key failings of left politics. Simply put, leftist radicals are too good at losing; it's almost the natural condition of radical politics on the left. What liberals might offer a Trumpian USA and a far right Israel, might be their pain, their trauma at having lost. Pain can motivate, it can gird loins as the pained seek a desperate relief in the work of resistance. 

How should liberals resist? Perhaps the first is refusal. Liberals should refuse to act as if things are normal, as if the state exists uncontaminated by its government. That means no bipartisan conviviality, no flags, no national anthems, no idealistic independence days - above all, a refusal to identify with the state as it exists now. Yes, there is much in Israel and the USA that is idealistic, right and good; these things are important, worth preserving and can be a foundation for a future (which is why I oppose most kinds of cultural and academic boycotts), but they can't redeem the state that exists now.

So, in resistance, the challenge isn't to 'reclaim' the state from its contamination by government; the challenge is to build a new state. That state could certainly be a liberal one and may sometimes superficially look like the old, but it has to be built from the ground up if it is to truly be rid of its anti-democratic encumbrances.

***

Have I been too pessimistic in this short piece? I certainly hope so. Maybe the US political system will prove more robust than expected. Maybe liberal Israelis and Diaspora liberal Zionists will pull Israel back from the brink. Maybe, maybe, maybe.

I know this though: Sometimes it can be helpful to behave as though all hope is lost. That absence of hope can lead us to create something that resists the darkness.