Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthis—Here they come. Names marching toward the war to come.

Colonialism, settler colonialism, – Stick the label on the wall. Stick it on the blackboard, stick it on them all.

Apartheid, genocide, nakba, resistance—one word, two words, three words, or four: battlefield losses yet words win the war.

In 2004, David Grossman wrote lyrics for a hit recorded by Hadag Nachash, one of Israel’s leading rap groups. With fifty-four car bumper stickers, David Grossman puts on display the irreconcilable verbal markers of the passionate political debates that not only define the diverse core identities of the country’s citizens, but which also shape the radically varied ways in which they see the world.

The question is whether the slogans shouted by Hamas promoters constitute a contemporary version of the sticker song. And to what extent can the twisting narrative threads of the Sticker Song unravel the aims embedded in jingles that have captured headlines, launched demonstrations, and polarized elections. Deploying the David Grossman rap to clarify the meaning of the slogans seizing so much airtime is admittedly an unusual way to unravel how and why events in the Middle East have become so central across the globe. But the very intellectual sites—that is, the colleges and universities with world-wide reputations–where it would be natural to turn for enlightenment on these topics are no longer places of energetic intellectual inquiry, particularly about Israel and the Middle East. Genuine academic rigor in the social sciences and humanities on these subjects has been so degraded, if not asphyxiated, that when it occurs, it takes place hidden behind closed doors, shunted aside by student and faculty activists parading their progressive credentials. The propensity to banish or distort genuine scholarship now stifles dissent in the classroom, surrendering the commitment to understanding the world in favor of a presumed dedication to changing it.

For that reason and unsurprisingly, Hamas’ October 7 barbarism won the movement a revolutionary legitimacy with people across the globe pledging loyalty to the glory of the Palestinian cause. The scale of backing for Hamas savagery cast the Middle East Conflict from its conventional territorial orbit into an apocalyptic realm with the words ‘from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’. For Hamas’ carnage aimed not at echoing the past injustices of 1948 but rather at highlighting how one might undo them by destroying the legitimacy of a Jewish state, if not actually deleting the country’s borders and name from the map. Becoming viral, incantations of purported crimes are chanted as they are marched through institutions across cities and towns in Europe and America. ‘Globalizing the intifada,’ as much a fashion statement as a social movement, is now curated as the essential marker of progressive identity and of cleansing the world of injustice whatever its manifestation. Palestinians have become fetishized as the Platonic ideal of innocent victims.

October 7 atrocities must be understood not only as........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)