(this text was produced by and with my German lawyers to help them with their pleading on my behalf in my case against Max Planck on December 10. I am pleased with it as a summary/history of my arguments and think it is worthwhile to share)
Professor Hage has researched and published on various dimensions of Israeli and Palestinian society, including on anti-Arab racism and Antisemitism, for the last forty years. In his PhD submitted, in 1987, he examined the similarities, at the time of his research, between Lebanese Christians (his own community), White South Africans, and Zionists. He showed how, in the 1960s and 70s, they shared a similar conception of themselves as bastions of western civilisation surrounded by barbarian others (Muslims/Arabs/Blacks), and in need of defending themselves against those others. He explored the way these communities present themselves as western, but having to engage in violence that other westerners don’t have to engage in, and as such blame westerners for not understanding that they have to engage in horrific actions because of the special circumstances they find themselves in, that they are doing it because they have to, and that they are doing it for all westerners, despite the latter not showing enough gratitude. Hage also showed how in such situations forms of domination and expansion present themselves as ‘modes of defending oneself’.
The work he did in his PhD offered him a fresh take on ideologies of White supremacy in Australia that he explored in his book White Nation. While researching for this book, he also explored White supremacists in France and the United States. In comparing these diverse forms of white supremacy Hage developed a key analysis of the differences between racism towards immigrants (numerological racism) and antisemitism (essentialist racism). He argued, as the name indicates, that numerological racism was dependent on numbers. In being racist towards immigrants, people can say: ‘there are too many Chinese in my street.’ Hage showed that it was important to stress the difference between a racism where ‘a few’ others as opposed to ‘too many’ are acceptable. Antisemites, Hage he stressed, never say such a thing. That is what makes them essentialist: one Jew in the street is already too many.
In another book, Against Paranoid Nationalism, Hage explores the resurgence of White ethnonationalism that followed the attack on and decline of multiculturalism as an alternative form of nationalism in the West. He argues that ethno-nationalism is a form of fundamentalism whether it is Muslim or Western. It is characterised by a belief in a mono-ethnic/cultural self that thinks that it needs a mono- ethnic/cultural environment specific to it in order to thrive and ‘realise’ itself. Hage argues that both the Israeli government and Islamic fundamentalists espouse similar forms form of ethno-nationalism. He also examines how in the case of Israel and Hamas during the wave of suicide bombing that the latter initiated, archaic political affects around archaic political entities such as mono-cultural nations are coupled with ultra-modern technologies of war. As he put it: “To my mind, both the Israeli invasion and the suicide bombings constitute a kind of warped postmodern pastiche of medievally violent political affects, early modern veneration of political entities such as ‘the nation’, and late modern military technology.”
In a series of articles and talks presented between 2005 and 2013 and published in his book Alter-Politics (2015) Hage develops his concept of Narcissistic victimhood. He argues that there is a way of experiencing victimhood that fosters narcissism: because you have been victimised you don’t feel like you owe anyone anything and you feel entitled to be selfish and look after yourself without caring what happens to or how you relate to others. Hage shows that this creates a psycho-social affinity between a sense of victimhood and ethno-nationalism as an embodiment of this narcissism. He also demonstrates how the same narcissistic victimhood is exhibited by Islamic fundamentalists. Hage argues that this narcissistic victimhood contributes to a politics of resistance that is only concerned with what it is against (anti-politics) as opposed to what it wants to build as an alternative (alter-politics). This leads him to develop a critique of the way, particularly in the case of Hezbollah and in Syria, the notion of ‘resistance’ becomes an ideology of power consolidation and authoritarianism that loses sight of what it is resisting.
Hage argues that Israeli and Palestinian narcissistic victimhood as they are present in the Israeli extreme-right and in Hamas makes them unable to face and come to terms with what he calls ‘the relational imperative’: that the very nature of the post-colonial world entails the inevitability of co-existence and living together. Hage argues that there are two forms of resistance: eliminationist resistance and reparative resistance. Slaves’ resistance against slave owners is a case of eliminationist resistance: the idea of slaves and slave owners co-existing is inconceivable, slave owners as a category has to be eliminated. Feminist resistance on the other hand is largely a reparative resistance: it does not aim to eliminate males but to transform them to create better relations with them. Hage argues that anti-colonial resistance in the twentieth century was primarily imagined as an eliminationist resistance: the colonisers had to be eliminated. But with the transformation and success of South African anti-colonialism a reparative anti-colonialism that highlights ‘the relational imperative’ has become a necessity.
In 2017 Hage publishes ‘Is Racism an Environmental Threat?’ in which he argues that the anthropocentric desire to subjugate nature and make it serve human needs, and the ethno-nationalist desire to subjugate a national space and make it serve the needs of a single ethnic/cultural group are part of the same mode of inhabiting the world. What Hage refers to as ‘generalised domestication’. Both are animated by fantasies of omnipotence over their surroundings. Hage argues that fantasies of omnipotence are often considered as unrealistic and mainly work as an aspirational guiding horizon. But in some cases, people believe in the actual imminent possibility of omnipotence. In such cases the fantasy becomes particularly destructive. It was the case until recently with the human domination of nature. Hage argues that Zionist ethno-nationalism is also propelled by a destructive fantasy of omnipotence believed to be imminent and possible. This destructive fantasy took shape in the aftermath of the 1967 war where Israel showed itself overwhelmingly superior to all the countries around it as far as military might and capacity of destruction is concerned. Ever since, Israeli governments take this overwhelming superiority as the norm below which Israeli power should never fall. The close and many-faceted relation between the western ‘military-industrial complex’, that is, weapon manufacturers, and Israel has worked to keep this fantasy of omnipotence alive. It is the single most important factor that makes Israel’s willingness to think of an alternative to subjugating its surroundings non-existent. This is why, Hage argues that while the political/military forces grounded in Palestinian narcissistic victimhood remain in need of being critiqued, any politics that wants to create the conditions of co-existence between Israelis and the Palestinians has to be a politics that restricts Israel’s capacity and desire to use overwhelming military power as a way of solving unsolvable problems.
There has been no other work on Israel/Palestine since 2017, as Prof. Hage concentrated on finishing his ethnography of the Lebanese Diaspora (The Diasporic Condition, 2021) and his theoretical work on the social phenomenology of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (Pierre Bourdieu’s Political Economy of Being, forthcoming 2025).
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