Joining 'The Freethinker' (plus: some thoughts on Israel and our darkening world)
Includes an update on my upcoming Charles Freeman interview
Forgive the self-indulgence, but I want to share some good personal news. I have just started a new job as Assistant Editor at The Freethinker, one of Britain’s oldest and most eminent freethinking/secular magazines.
I have written for it a few times and the editor, Emma Park, recently approached me with a job offer. I was surprised and delighted in equal measure. The Freethinker has reached new heights thanks to Emma’s hard work and now its remit goes far beyond religion and secularism—it covers philosophy, science, politics, current events, and more. It also features original interviews and reportage from around the world, from Kyiv to Tehran to Nigeria. I’m extremely proud to have become a small part of its long and noble history (more about which you can read here and here). I’d be very grateful if you visited the website, signed up for the newsletter, and followed The Freethinker on Twitter/X. If you are a writer, feel free to pitch or submit to editor@freethinker.co.uk.
I recently mentioned that I would be interviewing the scholar Charles Freeman on my Substack. Indeed I still will be, but now I’ll be conducting the interview for The Freethinker and republishing it here. The Freethinker interviews are in written format, so it will be a departure from the usual Den Discussions—but not less enjoyable, I’m sure.
Needless to say, anything I say here or anywhere else outside of my capacity as Assistant Editor is not endorsed by The Freethinker. All opinions are, obviously, my own and my own alone. This goes especially for everything I’m going to say below in this mish-mash of a post! One final indulgence: you can find my previous articles for The Freethinker, including reviews of Salman Rushdie’s latest novel and Graham Smith’s anti-monarchy tract, here.
Some thoughts on the war in Israel and our darkening world
It’s very difficult to say anything about the ongoing horrors in Israel since everything is moving so quickly.
Almost certainly, Iran was behind the Hamas attack, but what does that mean for the global order? What does it mean for the revolutionaries in Iran? Was Iran’s ally Russia aware of the impending attack and, if so, was it supportive? Could Russia have actually aided the assault? Will the war spread? Will Israel flatten Gaza? Will the Palestinian people ever have freedom and peace? What will happen to the peace talks between Israel and the Arab states? Will Israeli democracy survive the cynical and bigoted Netanyahu? Will China feel emboldened to invade Taiwan? Will America’s might be spread too thin to respond to China if it does? Will anti-Semitism in the West become even more poisonous? Will far-left fools ever stop valorising the theocratic butchers of Hamas? (Well, the answer to that last question, at least, is pretty obvious.)
Questions, questions, questions at yet another hinge moment in global history. (We seem to be experiencing quite a few of those lately.) I have known staunch supporters of Israel and even the odd Hamas defender in my time, so I know how seemingly intractable this conflict is. But it doesn’t have to be. Here are some things that I think every decent person should be able to say without much hesitation and with no contradiction:
Hamas is a theocratic, anti-Semitic, genocidal band of thugs who, when not busy slaughtering Jews, bully and persecute the Palestinian people—beating and threatening dissident Palestinians, deliberately using Palestinians as human shields, and turning Palestinian children into suicide bombers. They are not the friends of the Palestinian people nor are they noble freedom-fighters rising up against a colonial power. They are fascists backed by a powerful theocratic regime and their ultimate aims are to create an authoritarian Islamic state and to exterminate the Jews.
There have been and are many Palestinian voices who condemn the likes of Hamas and who don’t despise Jews. The stifled secular and democratic Palestinian movement deserves to be better known and supported. Think, for example, of Mustafa Barghouti’s Palestinian National Initiative (PNI) party (even if one disagrees with the PNI and Barghouti about certain things, as I do, or is even disappointed by Barghouti’s waffling over Hamas’s attack in recent days, as I have been).
Israel has every right to defend itself against Hamas—and should be materially and morally supported in doing so.
Israel has no right to respond to Hamas with indifference or worse to Palestinian lives—and should be criticised and even materially punished if it does.
The Palestinian people have been and continue to be treated appallingly by Israel, and Jewish fanaticism (often backed by American Christian fundamentalism) is a threat to peace in the Middle East just as Hamas is. This is not to make a moral equivalence between the mostly open and democratic Israel and the far worse Hamas.
The only solution is democracy and coexistence in some form alongside a repudiation of bigotry and theocracy by all sides.
I would make another point, though it is not one that I would expect to be accepted by most people in the way that I think the above points could be:
The two-state solution, moribund as it has been in recent years, is still the best hope for peace, creating as it (hopefully) would two democratic and relatively secular nations living side by side—if not in harmony, then at least peacefully.
(Those who call for a unified, secular, democratic state encompassing all of Israel/Palestine—a contingent that includes Mustafa Barghouti—have my sympathy, but I don’t think it is a feasible option, not least because it would likely lead to the mass murder of Jews by Islamists and the people the Islamists have exploited and indoctrinated for decades).
We live in a darkening age. An anti-democratic axis is forming, if it has not already formed, between Russia, China, and Iran. The Israel crisis is part of this broader story and might prove to be a central turning point in it. It is all too easy to fear the end of liberal democratic internationalism, pressed as it is on all sides and from within by vicious enemies. These words of W.H. Auden haunt me more than ever:
Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.
But there is always hope. Salman Rushdie, in his memoir Joseph Anton, cited and took heart from Günter Grass’s response to an interviewer who had asked if the flame of the Enlightenment was fading: “But there is no other source of light.”
There is no other source of light. That’s the thing to keep in mind right now, more than ever.
Sincere congratulation on the new position.
Over the years, I've agreed with you on most issues, but your point 5 requires some rebuttal. Arabs living inside Israel proper even have citizenship while the "refugees" in the "disputed territories" do not. So not all the Palestinians "... have been or continue too be treated appallingly by Israel..." Yes, some rights of citizenship are reserved for Jews - something regrettable, but understandable, given the multi-millennia long suppression, slaughter, confiscation of property, and expulsion Jews have experienced in most of Europe and the middle east. Why are the great grandchildren of Palestinians considered refugees? After the 1948 war about 700,000 Arabs were pushed out or chose to leave Israel while an identical number of Jews left countries like Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Egypt where their ancestors had lived for centuries. Recall the 1948 war was launched by these Arab countries against an infant democracy comprised of Holocaust survivors. There are no refugee camps filled with descendants of these Jews - they were absorbed by Israel. The displaced Arabs were forced into camps where many of their progeny remain today, 75 years later. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) is a cynical body that in collusion with Israel's enemies insured the Palestinians would remain in squalor in these camps as propaganda fodder. How many refugee camps have been in place without resettling the occupants for 75 years? 5 years? These are the culprits responsible for Palestinian immiseration. Israel, for its part, has offered peace on several occasions, only to be rejected by Palestinian leadership, who will only accept the destruction of Israel.