The Left’s Violence Problem - by Anastasia Berg

For our new special issue on violence, I commissioned Jacob Abolafia to write about the left’s fascination with and embrace of violence. Jacob is an Israel-based American political theorist and leftist activist who teaches philosophy at Ben-Gurion University in the Negev. In his piece, “Violence and the Left,” which is framed as a review of Adam Kirsch’s On Settler Colonialism, Jacob argues that despite all that Kirsch gets wrong, he gets something important right. “The left’s flirtation with political violence, with ‘the resistance’ in Gaza, with unrealized uprisings at home,” he writes, “occupy the place where an understanding of effective means and a vision of emancipatory ends should be.” There are few people that I find more helpful to talk to about Israel-Palestine than Jacob, and I’m happy to be able to share one such conversation with our readers here—about the failures of violence and nonviolence, and what people abroad should be calling for today. To read Jacob’s essay in ful

For our new special issue on violence, I commissioned Jacob Abolafia to write about the left’s fascination with and embrace of violence. Jacob is an Israel-based American political theorist and leftist activist who teaches philosophy at Ben-Gurion University in the Negev. In his piece, “Violence and the Left,” which is framed as a review of Adam Kirsch’s On Settler Colonialism, Jacob argues that despite all that Kirsch gets wrong, he gets something important right. “The left’s flirtation with political violence, with ‘the resistance’ in Gaza, with unrealized uprisings at home,” he writes, “occ