Climate catastrophe, the ‘Zionist Entity’ and ‘The German guy’: An anatomy of the Malm–Jappe dispute, by Matthew Bolton – 29 November 2023

This chapter is based on a short argument between two Marxian academics, Andreas Malm and Anselm Jappe, which broke out on a leftist Zoom panel, ostensibly about Covid and the state, during the Israel–Hamas escalation of May 2021. Malm, an influential environmental theorist and activist, interrupted his presentation on the pandemic to accuse the ‘Zionist entity’ of fascism and proto-genocide, and to call for solidarity with Hamas. Jappe left the panel in protest, to which Malm responded with a contemptuous reference to Jappe’s German background. The chapter argues that this contretemps, however minor, reveals something important about the ongoing development of antisemitism on the contemporary left, namely its growing intertwining with climate activism. It suggests that Malm and Jappe’s divergence on the questions of Israel, Zionism and antisemitism is an expression of deep underlying theoretical differences in their respective approaches to the state and capital. The latter half of the chapter hones in on Malm’s dismissal of Jappe as a ‘German guy’, arguing this is shorthand for a caricatured and dehistoricised account of the German left’s historical role in forcing the German state to confront its Nazi past, one which dismisses the continued existence and dangers of antisemitism both within Germany and elsewhere.

In: The Rebirth of Antisemitism in the 21st Century

In May 2021, a long-running (and, at the time of writing, still unresolved) legal dispute over the ownership of a number of properties in the Sheikh Jarrah area of East Jerusalem exploded into violence. Clashes between Israeli police and protestors at the Al-Asqa mosque were followed by thousands of rockets being indiscriminately fired at Israeli cities by Hamas militants in Gaza. In response, Israeli forces bombed targets in Gaza, with many civilian casualties. Inter-communal street violence between Jews and Arabs within Israel followed. Large protests were held against Israeli actions in Gaza in numerous cities in Europe and the United States. Multiple violent and verbal attacks on Jewish people, Jewish-owned shops and synagogues were recorded in the wake of the protests. Social media was awash with posts, images and memes, many using antisemitic concepts, signalling opposition to and moral condemnation of Israel. Comparisons between Israel and apartheid South Africa and police violence in the United States were widespread.

In the middle of this febrile period, an online discussion panel was held by the ‘Red May’ collective in Seattle. The topic of the debate was ‘Covid, Climate, Chronic Emergency: Antinomies of the State’, and sought to explore different approaches to the state in the midst of the unprecedented interventions of the Covid era. The discussants were the sociologist Alberto Toscano, whose article on the topic was the inspiration for the debate, and the two theorists’ Toscano’s paper had engaged with: Andreas Malm, whose pamphlet ‘Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency’ argued that the ‘war footing’ the state had undertaken to tackle the pandemic should be extended to combat the climate crisis; and Anslem Jappe, whose co-authored book De Virus Illustribus, contended that state interventions aimed at ‘protecting’ a population – whether from Covid, climate change or economic crisis – are doomed to fail, because the state is an inextricable part of the capitalist social totality which caused the problems in the first place.

[READ THE REST, via academia.edu]

Climate catastrophe, the ‘Zionist Entity’ and ‘The German guy’: An anatomy of the Malm–Jappe dispute, by Matthew Bolton – 29 November 2023

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