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Violence and the Left, by Jacob Abolafia – 11 August 2025

From The Point

Is now really the right time to talk about the left’s political violence problem? Graduate students are being disappeared off the streets of college towns. American-made bombs have killed numbers of Gazan children greater than the circulations of n+1 and Jewish Currents combined. The far right is triumphant across the world and already turning the levers of state power against the under-documented and the overeducated.

Against this background, it seems risible to turn back to what Adam Shatz has called “the ethno-tribalist fantasies of the decolonial left, with their Fanon recitations and posters of paragliders.” Febrile delusions of nativists and reactionaries aside, the left’s fascination with violence, its Mangione memes and Sinwar graffiti, appears to have few real-life consequences outside the hurt feelings of some undergraduates and the ruffled feathers of those business and cultural figures who seem glad of the excuse to be able to finally defect to the rampant right.

And yet I am going to try to convince you that the left’s violence problem is serious and real. The left’s endorsement of political violence is most dangerous not for what it says—the actual arguments are frequently below reproach, and their effects on the social world remain relatively minor—but for what it does to the political horizons of the left today.

The left’s flirtation with political violence, with “the resistance” in Gaza, with unrealized uprisings at home, occupy the place where an understanding of effective means and a vision of emancipatory ends should be. As the critic Adam Kirsch observes in his recent polemic On Settler Colonialism, the left frequently supports the use of violence in situations where there is no feasible way in which violence can achieve its desired ends. In some cases, it refuses to even state these ends, leaving a negative space where a political vision should be.

For Kirsch, the clearest example of this confusion about means and ends was the celebration across the left of Hamas’s attack across the Gaza border in October 2023, an attack whose aims it is not clear the Anglophone left correctly understood, but whose violent methods it frequently celebrated. It was the events of October 7th and their reception that prompted Kirsch’s fusillade against what he takes to be the essential cause of the left’s confusion—its devotion to the doctrines of settler-colonial theory. Kirsch’s book sets out to show that the titular concept

attributes many different varieties of injustice to the same abstraction and promises that slaying this dragon will end them all. It cultivates hatred for people and institutions it sees as obstacles to redemption, and even justifies violence against them. And it offers a distorted account of history, to make it easier to divide the world into the guilty and the innocent.

Kirsch’s book certainly has its flaws. Chief among them is its blindness to the political realities of Israel, a state that was only ever something close to a liberal democracy for the six months between the end of military rule over Israeli Arabs at the end of 1966 and the beginning of the military occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in June 1967. It ignores the ironic truth that Israel is in fact a perfect example of an exploitative colonial state in its extractive and repressive settlement project in the Palestinian territories in the West Bank, and that these Israeli colonists could be returned to their metropole—Israel within the Green Line—were there only the political will to do it. And it is silent about the ways in which the Gaza war has long ceased to be a war of self-defense and is now wholly a war of territorial expansion and political expediency in the best case, and of ethnic cleansing and civilian annihilation in the worst case. These are serious mistakes about the situation in Israel, compounded by some glaring omissions and uncharitable readings of the scholarly canon he excoriates. Kirsch’s diagnosis of the political and ideological tendencies of the postcolonial left in the Anglosphere does not, however, depend on them.

Defenders of settler-colonial theory nevertheless accuse Kirsch of a feat of prestidigitation: taking a staid academic subfield devoted to explaining the history and sociology of colonization and its consequences and turning it, as Samuel Brody puts it in the Boston Review, into “a repository of everything that liberals, centrists, and conservatives have hated about radical academia since McCarthyism.” But Kirsch’s most important target, as the philosopher Michael Walzer notes in his review of the book, is neither the academic field of settler-colonial studies nor the state of the conflict in Israel/Palestine. Rather, Kirsch is after the “actual politics” that animates the anti-colonial left today. According to Kirsch, their political goal, decolonization, “is a zero-sum game, in which Natives win (land, sovereignty, power) only if settlers lose.” To quote the scholars Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, cited frequently by Kirsch, the claims of the colonized and the claims of settlers are in principle “incommensurable” and therefore not open to negotiation. If politics is the art of the possible, or as many since Aristotle have supposed, a science of living together, the politics informed by this brand of postcolonial theory is instead religious and, in the words of Frantz Fanon, Manichean: the triumph of good over evil by any means necessary.

Kirsch’s critics complain that he is making a strawman out of contemporary left political approaches. He is not. Kirsch’s critique makes good sense of the fruitless desperation of left-wing violence in the United States, as well as the global left’s often thoughtless support for violence in the Middle East. More damningly, it picks out patterns of thought now common in the leading left-wing organs of culture and ideas. I have chosen three such examples almost at random. I could have easily found a dozen more. But even among this richness of embarrassments, no writer exemplifies the obscurity of the contemporary decolonial left’s ends and the absurdity of its means more than Andreas Malm.

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Jacob Abolafia is Senior Lecturer at the Department of Philosophy at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. He writes on the history of political thought and critical theory, broadly construed.

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