The modern scaffold of the third estate

“We are distressed by the open letter recently posted on Artforum, which does not acknowledge the ongoing mass hostage emergency, the historical context, and the atrocities committed in Israel on October 7, 2023—the bloodiest day in Jewish history since the Holocaust,” the letter read. But if An Open Letter from the Art Community to Cultural Organizations was poorly written, A Response to the Open Letter of October 19 is poorly worded . Are we distressed by the emergency, the context or the significance of what was committed in Israel on October 7, 2023?

For Israel, every recognition of progress between Palestine and the rest of the world further entrenches Hamas. The organization is predicated on the annihilation of Israel. In the intellectual community, both pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian positions are well informed, or at least, well-read: the urgency of Adorno’s thesis in Negative Dialectics — that the state of humanity’s unfreedom, thought and action must be arranged in a way so that Auschwitz may never repeat itself — backs us into the corner of conscious alliance with Israel.

At stake in the divide is the difference between post-industrial war crime and its negative dissolution into jihad. Wrote Stephan Grigat in 2011 for the Platypus Review, in To Know the Worst: Antisemitism and the Failure of the Left in Iran , the distinction is crucial between a program for which “the death of a human is shrugged off as a part of the business, while having never been originally intended; and an economy of death that, as a paranoid reaction, originates from instrumental reason, but does not coincide with it entirely, as it declares annihilation an end in itself.”

This will require a hatred of liberalism, Judaism and free women to work. And though Israel’s attack on the Gaza strip has been called genocidal, Hamas’ regime is, in fact, much more closely aligned with German National Socialist ideology. It requires the complete effacement of the economic division between family and state. The organization believes it occupies a transitional moment in history. It finds its final form in annihilation, but it finds its purpose in its display. What’s been understated, so far, amongst criticisms from the international community— and the art world at large— is how alone Israel is in the situation.

The US has a national interest in Israel’s control over the Palestinian territories but its national security is not tied up in 150 miles of Biblical waterfront. Israel’s political isolation is part of the reason why the art world remains so divided over a conflict that, between any other two entities other than the US, would be a humanitarian no-brainer.

So far, there’s been little space to unravel the dynamics of hypocrisy, because to do so points not to a contradiction but a discourse. The global advance of Islamic jihadism has been enough reason for the U.S. to overstep international agreements, bomb civilian enclaves and pursue its national interests with force of law. To say that Israel has no place doing the same when its national interests exceed political motive is to reinforce the exceptionalism that only those at the very Center—the US, China and Russia— have the right to make might.

Meanwhile public appeals to the “international community” are starting to feel more and more like pissing into the Leviathan of social media. If austerity, restraint and a functioning domestic economy dictate the standards by which second-class states are included in a world order, Israel, lacking the legal aura of the US, looks like a bad girl. As the institutional authority of the EU weakens, the Center can only hold. Violations that would otherwise invert the legitimacy of a recognized nation-state seem to be the currency of those states.

Israel’s ferocity is as unlimited as the power the state believes it must hold to prevent its question. It will treat civilians as any other resource put to war, that is, as a great expenditure. And Israel must make a truly impressive spectacle, for war in the face of Holy War should not just be heavy-handed, but firmly decadent.

Is this a war between states or subjects constituted by states? News coverage of the conflict transforms Palestine into a subject of torture by the same technique it turns the Ukraine into a soccer team. Like a death row criminal or a drug addict, there is little optimism that Palestine can be “rehabilitated”. An American campaign of “shock and awe” intimidates the rogue state, like a feral animal, into a civilized national order or into extinction.

Civilian casualty is no longer a byproduct of international conflict but its main objective. Israel will have claimed victory when Palestinian obedience is regulated, either through exile or through famine. The restriction of commodities or limits on the development of infrastructure within the Palestinian territories is meant to feel arbitrary, like racial segregation: to limit, block, prevent and exclude harks to the definition of second-class languages in computer programming.

As if the the roaches could be exterminated by getting rid of the rats. Between Russia and the Ukraine, it was the hope that trade sanctions, including the disruption of digital services, would make the overhead costs of Russia’s military invasion too expensive. But this is only expensive for a state that benefits more from interdependence than control over its own resources.

What’s important to recognize is that the violence is real and its reality is also symbolic. Artforum is not alone on the institutional circuit for taking a hard stance against political effects downstream. The blurring of lines between professional status and personal statement in a culture industry constituted by social media increases the costs and risks that an executive power is expected to manage. One senses that the goal of states and institutions— from Artforum’s appeal to a “fresh start” to the overall emphasis on authority when there is no responsibility— is the establishment of a program that takes it shape from the spectacular act of politics, and not the autonomy of the political.

Whether or not Israel has the choice to replay a history of punishment will be the stuff of syllabi for decades to come. As to the institutional silence around the subjection of Palestine to Israeli rule, it will not be public awareness or even boycotts that radicalizes it, but the willingness to intervene in the shaping of speech, in the disciplining of discourses and a divestment of docility when it comes to international activism.

The definition of “second class” is that it is decidedly not first-class. With horizons limited by expectations of economic stability and growth optimization, the occupation of a new geopolitical space is more and more unlikely.