1. Introduction and Foundational Arguments
Global allegiance to Palestinianism is not a derivative of favorable demography in the lands of Islam, nor of the familiar predisposition toward hatred of Israel in the countries of the West.
The claim of the writer of these lines is that Palestinianism draws "mountains of sympathy that are unavoidable, seductive, and even entirely logical," because it grants narrative corroboration and concreteness to ideologies both ancient and modern in their relation to a Jewishness that exceeds the Jews' being a demographic minority or an object of hatred.
It is further argued that the quantitative pull of Palestinianism follows from the fact that, despite its being an Islamic force, its self-positioning as the victim of Jewishness creates for it the possibility of forming a coalition composed of classical Christians, moderate and fundamentalist Muslims, old and new Marxists, critics of nationalism, and Jews who hate their own people, all of whom conclude with it a "covenant of supply and demand," within which prior political, religious, and ideational currents receive renewed corroboration of their constitutive relation to Jewishness, while Palestinianism enjoys access to the web of attributions already present in those currents' critique of Jewishness, attributions that can now be assigned to the object of its own struggle.
The qualitative force of Palestinianism we attribute to the fact that the object of its opposition (Jewishness) already exists within a field of prior categorical judgments, religious, socio-economic, mythic, ethnic, which assist in constituting an a priori critique that conceptualizes the Palestinian experience as a "historical laboratory" of Jewishness, and from which is derived the proof of the correctness of the judgments ascribed to the object of opposition since time immemorial.
Thus, both quantitatively and qualitatively, Palestinianism is capable of producing a "trans temporal" and "multi-narrative" synthesis (ancient-religious, modern-economic, and postmodern national) with respect to the object of its struggle, while relying on prior judgments that define its object of opposition in advance and that are woven into its own historical experience, and in this it produces value for systems of thought foreign to it, which thereby gain relevance, narrative continuity, and even a holism realized within a defined and observable laboratory of space and time (Palestine / the Land of Israel of the modern era).
It therefore has no need of a public-relations apparatus or a sophisticated propaganda staff, since it is able to attract allies who are themselves searching for corroboration of the reliability of the judgments and categories that constitute their relation to Jewishness.
For this reason they search desperately and make pilgrimage, not infrequently in contradiction of other constitutive values within their own doctrines, in pursuit of a proximity to it that supplies self justification for a comprehensive ideational archetype in which Jewishness holds a constitutive antithetical role within the entire ideational architecture of these currents. Palestinianism is able to do this because the categories in which Jewishness exists within the currents external to it, that is, within the Catholic, Islamic, and Marxist canons, fix Jewishness as a demigod whose actuality is exposed beyond every doubt or myth, within the frame of the Palestinian experience.
Palestinianism, from its position of concrete oppression, allows ideational and religious movements far larger than Jewishness to resolve their doubts with regard to the earthly and actual Jewishness.
It proves Marx's words that "behind the back of every tyrant stands the Jew," and it makes possible something far more fundamental than mere "antisemitism": the laying bare of Jewishness as an enslaving and constitutive mastery, from which, in a process of narrative concretization, the victim is redeemed.
2. Catholicism and Marxism: From a Minority of Redeeming Jews to a Universal Redemption from the Jews
The mythic and evaluative dichotomy in which the Gospel literature placed itself over against Pharisaic Judaism, and the class dichotomy in which Marxism set its vision over against the Jewish Question, both identify in Palestinianism a movement that likewise exists in permanent tension against a Jewishness that assumes for itself the role of oppressive mastery, a mastery requiring a struggle of liberation without which, as in a Gnostic drama, the world would be devoid of holism.
Before the Neoplatonic Church Fathers positioned the Jews as opponents of the Gospel, the New Testament already contained some 101 Judeophobic references; the fact that the scribes and Pharisees "devour widows' houses" (Matthew 14) or are simply "lovers of money" (Luke 16) in the Synoptic Gospels was explained by Paul in Acts and in his epistles as a derivative of a legalistic tendency toward hardness of heart, which in the Torah led to persecutions of those who believed in the Messiah and to political conspiracies against them, alongside institutional and moral corruption on the part of those described in the last Gospel to be set down in writing — John — as "doing the deeds of your father… your father the devil, and the desires of your father you wish to do" (John 8).
Similarly, before the late (anti-modern) Marxist variant took shape, the first Left Hegelians saw Jewishness as a negative phenomenon, whether as a religion constituting the foundation of universal transcendence, or as a social group.
The decent and intellectual criticism of Ludwig Feuerbach in The Essence of Christianity (1841), which saw Judaism as inclined toward materialism and particularism, was continued in a vulgar and categorical manner by Bruno Bauer (1843) and his student Karl Marx (1844), who saw in it the core of the corrupting European bourgeoisie — in two separate works bearing the identical title, On the Jewish Question.
Bauer held that a Jew is incapable of being a free, progressive, or complete man, and that equality of rights must be withheld from him — and he identified their social function as those who "made their nest in the pores and interstices of bourgeois society" (On the Jewish Question, Bauer, 1843). Marx, for his part, developed his conception of Jewishness into an entire metaphysics.
He defined the universal class emancipation of the world as an emancipation from "the empirical essence of Judaism" — huckstering — after which "the Jew will become impossible," and following which "the social emancipation of the Jew is the emancipation of society from Judaism" (On the Jewish Question, Marx, 1844).
The Marxist and Bauerian identification of Jewishness with the bourgeoisie derived from the identification of the ostensibly neutral term with a popular pejorative for Jewish city-dwellers in the German-speaking sphere. They represented the moneyed Jewry of Europe, which did with the continent as it pleased. Or, in the words of Marx's friend, the converted poet with the ambivalent relation to his own Jewishness, Heinrich Heine, as the bourgeois lords of the world in which "money is god and Rothschild is his prophet" (Heine, 1841).
But whereas the demonization in the gospel of Paul and John sought liberation from the fetters of Pharisaism and impervious legalism, for Marx and Bauer ancient Christianity — though criticized as alienating man from his own self-consciousness — was not perceived as the engine of the modern bourgeoisie; for that, more ancient foundations were responsible, as Marx put it:
"The fact that 1,855 years ago Christ drove the Jewish moneychangers out of the temple, and that the moneychangers of our own age enlisted on the side of tyranny happen again to be Jews, is perhaps no more than a historical coincidence" (New-York Tribune, 1856).
The Marxist and Pauline Weltanschauungen thus saw, at an early stage of their formation, Jewishness as an opposed otherness obstructing the realization of alternative positive values. The Jew is therefore not merely an object of psychological or sociological criticism, as we shall seek to demonstrate, he obstructs an eschatological vision meant to redeem man.
In the words of the mathematician and researcher of Marxism James Lindsay, in Marx's eyes the constitutive sin lies in the fact that the human species was corrupted in the course of history by means of money ("the jealous god of Israel"), having abandoned its primordial and ideal condition as a social animal (Lindsay, 2023). In the eyes of Catholicism (heir of Paulinism), it was the eating from the fruit of the tree of knowledge that prevented the possibility of living a life free of sin and of being saved. And if in Marx's eyes the task of socialism is to redeem man from the money that alienates him from his labor and from his fellow, by means of a revolutionary socialism that would produce a "socialization of human nature" (The German Ideology, written 1845, published 1932), in Paul's eyes it is faith in the atoning blood of Jesus that makes eternal salvation possible (Romans 3).
Between sin and its expiation there stands, on one side, "money, that jealous god of Israel, beside which no other god may exist" (On the Jewish Question, 1844), and on the other those who "killed the Lord Jesus and the prophets, and drove us out… for they hinder us from speaking to the Gentiles that they may be saved, so as always to fill up the measure of their sins" (1 Thessalonians 2).
Indeed, whereas in Paul, Jewishness weighs down with its sins upon the revelation of salvation, in Marx it delays the appearance of "social man," since "in Jewishness we recognize the universal anti-social element of our time" (On the Jewish Question, 1844, and the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts).
Paulinism and Marxism therefore share a reliance on the existence of a primordial, constitutive sin, one requiring universal redemption, and one that until its occurrence leaves the human species in eschatological expectation over against an obstructing Jewish demigod — who in the case of Marxism is even the source of the sin, in his lust for money, and in the Pauline case is its chief instrument, to be overcome.
As Marx says, identifying the source of money everywhere with Jewishness:
"The capitalist knows that all commodities, however shabby they may look or ill they may smell, are in faith and in truth money, inwardly circumcised Jews" (Capital, 1867).
And as Paul says, identifying in the Torah the source of the deception of the spirit: "all who rely on the works of the law are under a curse" (Galatians 3).
The spiritual and material sin requiring redemption, existing thus in classical Christianity and in Marxism out of a dichotomous tension with Gnostic characteristics, whether expressed as a material class struggle over the essence of humanity and society between the bourgeoisie and the owners of capital and the proletariat, or as a religious struggle over the salvation of humanity between the deniers of Jesus and the community of believers, finds one and the same enemy/source.
So tight is the connection that Marx the atheist does not conceal his deliberately evangelical attitude toward Jews (the devourers of widows, as we recall), characterized by a particular avarice toward the needy, carried out by "the Pharisee of a capitalist, represented by one of his servants," who "accompanies the operation of course with the sanctimonious phrase: 'This is for mother,' but he knows well that the poor children must strain themselves and help" (Capital, 1867).
Pharisaic sectarianism as the Jewish bourgeoisie: these are archetypes of a mode of existence that is masterful and oppressive, defining the enslavement that obstructs liberation. Jewishness is an object charged with negation, and on the way to being redeemed from it, new modes of life and new ideas are revealed, set against it in sharp contrast. For this reason, Judaism stands as a category itself enslaved to the role of the master, which in modern material (economic) reality and in the ancient world of spirit (religious) requires sublation/removal (Aufheben).
The Pharisees and priests in Paul's Jerusalem are no different from the peddlers of Cologne or the financiers of Marx's London — a mythic-yet-actual other that defines negativity, disrupts holism, and from whose influence one must be redeemed by way of an alternative order. The shared demigod-hood of Paulinism, which became Catholic Christianity, and of Marxism, which developed into advanced forms of social criticism and systems of government, permits both the bearers of the ecumenical religious gospel and the devotees of Capital and its later interpreters to search out an identical morphology, or a similar archetypal narrative, in Palestinianism, which presents Jewishness as anti-holistic in its full force, and does so, moreover, from a position of manifest inferiority.
3. Palestinianism as the Immanentization of Jewishness in the Eyes of Catholicism and Marxism
"Jewishness," which exists in the Catholic canon under the presumption of abomination/blindness/avarice, and which in Marxist circles is characterized as possessing anti-social and separatist tendencies, is not merely a "mythic warning sign," but a class that becomes an "anti-class" possessing ontic quality in its encounter with the Palestinian.
The Jew does not merely obstruct gospel and redemption or endanger metaphysical harmony in the world in the abstract --- on the contrary, he is a victimizing anti-class. Herein lies the greatness and genius of Palestinianism, which consists not in its struggle against Jewishness as an abstract ideational anti-class or as a class symbol, as it is positioned in the Marxist and Catholic canons, but in the fact that through it, and through its struggle, Jewishness is presented as an actual anti-class, one that operates without any need for a religious or economic narrative or belief.
In this way, in retrospect, Palestinianism also makes it easier for Marxists and Catholics alike to claim credibility and broad predictive power with regard to the entire eschatological course in which they place their faith, a course in which, as we recall, Jewishness has a role of value.
Moreover, Palestinianism, being objectively weaker militarily than Zionism, is capable of performing a "leap" and a restoration back to the period in which both early Christianity and Marxian doctrine were marginal and far weaker than Jewishness and its ramifications in the second century CE or in the nineteenth century, long before billions of human beings became Catholics and hundreds of millions became Marxists. It is thereby set against Jewishness at a stage in which the latter is a distinct and (relatively) powerful nation, acting from a position of manifest superiority against a factor that is (ostensibly) in a position of manifest inferiority. Palestinianism thus grants enormous value to the largest religion in the world, and to the leading intellectual and political bon ton of East and West, which, after the advantage they have acquired over recent centuries, can hardly still claim to be oppressed by a crushing, demigod-like Jewishness.
By means of Palestinianism, therefore, the Jew no longer represents merely an archaic religious-moral sin committed to writing by a negligible intra-Jewish heretical sect thousands of years ago, or a class stereotype of economic and social corruption characteristic of a group within white Europe in the days of industrialization, but an injustice open to empirical observation from an overt position of victimhood.
In this it grants Catholicism and Marxism relevance, freshness, and renewed validity with regard to an important point of reference in their doctrines, one which, given their present magnitude and broad influence today, could no longer be justified before any sensible person.
Finally, given that Palestinianism supplies all this by means of an up-to-date post-colonial aesthetic (which itself has weighty genealogical foundations in Catholic and Marxist thought), it becomes easy to understand the secret of its attraction, in the sense of "riding the wave of a late interpretation of our religious/ideational doctrine, based on the current bon ton."
The demigod, though far smaller than his haters, is revealed with the help of Palestinianism as living and venomous, as characterizable in terms of irrational religious and sectarian caprices and in terms of illicit material greed — precisely those attributes of the victimizer, whose conduct opens a window onto the ratification of the remaining cosmological presuppositions of those ideologies and religions that defined him in the first place as a constitutive archetype.
Classical and new Marxism, and Catholicism (and, it must be admitted, a certain number of Pro-Slavic and radical Protestant currents as well), which have not yet shaken off the positioning of Jewishness as a demigod (since their ideational structure requires it), will never attain by their own power what
Palestinianism grants them. Hence, more than Palestinianism needs its Western allies (given that it has many other allies among the billions of adherents of Islam), it is they who need it. It serves as a worthy argument on the ideological and theological level not only that the Jew is a demigod, but that the religious and ideational doctrines which identified and formulated his role may be capable of demonstrating an a posteriori correctness regarding still further strata through which they view the world.
Palestinianism is therefore an asset that justifies the ongoing eschatological tension within Marxism and Catholicism — a tension that awaits redemption from the dominion of a Jewishness which, even in its return to history in national form, is revealed once again as an object requiring liberation from enslavement.
The dichotomous media narrative, and the emphasis on blood and victims, are merely tactics for replicating and making present, in dramatized form, a deeper ideational movement of the kind described in these pages, in which Palestinianism serves as the necessary stage set for the creation of a qualitative catharsis — on which we shall now expand.
4. Within and Beyond Good and Evil
The built-in sympathy for Palestinianism is generated out of a dramatic and theatrical system, in the measure that the conceptions of "good" (slave/poor man) and "evil" (rich man/master), which are in any case shared by Catholicism and Marxism (Lindsay, 2023), receive validation in their encounter with Jewishness — or with its present variant, Zionism.
In Christianity, those who crucified Jesus on false charges, and in Marxism, those who drained the blood of the exploited in the financial markets, become the seekers of children's corpses in the fighter jets in the skies, or the bearded plunderers of land upon the earth.
The victimizer is part of an iconic drama that identifies his Jewishness with the irregular and negative elements of reality. In this drama, after the moment in which Jewishness is revealed and exposed in its nakedness (the Crucifixion, exploitation, occupation), a situation arises in which the primordial archetypal sin (in Christianity: the existence of sin and, as its derivative, the death of Jesus; in Marxism: capital and, as its derivative, exploitation; and in Palestinianism: the theft and, as its derivative, the occupation), which was embodied in the Jew, becomes in the course of "the crime" inseparable from Jewishness.
Thereby an evil is created that is able, after the dramatic moment in the story, to take upon itself the character of a circular evil. An evil that can be characterized, and that characterizes. One that is not opaque, but merely the surface of an essence
