Feminist icon and American philosopher Judith Butler on Monday defended remarks describing the Hamas October 7 massacre as “armed resistance” and downplaying the antisemitic nature of the attacks during a March 3 panel in Paris.
At the Pantin event hosted by Paroles d’honneur and co-organized by Tzedek! Decolonial Jewish collective, Permanent Revolution, Organisation antifasciste autonome, Paris-Banlieue, Union Juive Française pour la paix, and the New Anticapitalist Party, Butler said that Hamas’s actions were operations against the state in a response to Israeli subjugation, and not chiefly antisemitic. She also questioned the role that sexual violence took in the pogrom.
“We can have different views as Hamas as a political party, we can have different views on armed resistance, but I think it is more honest and historically correct to say that the uprising of October 7 was an act of armed resistance,” Butler said on March 3. “It is not a terrorist attack and it’s not an antisemitic attack, it was an attack against Israelis.”
While Butler said that she did not like the attack and it caused her anguish, she also said she would be “foolish if I then decided that the only violence in the scene was the violence done to Israeli people.”
“The violence done to Palestinians has been happening for decades. This was an uprising that comes from a state of subjugation and against a violent state apparatus,” Butler explained. “Now you can be for or against armed resistance, you can be for or against Hamas, but let us at least call it armed resistance and then we can have a debate about whether we think it’s right or whether they did the right thing.”
Butler said that it was a problem that if one called it armed resistance it was presumed that one was in favor of armed resistance or a tactic. She decried Palestinian self-defense being often called terrorism when it was a way for them to stay alive and seek liberty. In contrast, she said that Israel had subjugated a people in the name of self-defense, a term that allowed the rationalization of systematic oppression.
The Berkeley professor said that non-violence was not an absolute principle in every situation, but an aspiration for what was needed to restructure the world so that people could live in a world without violence. She said that aspiration could be maintained when engaging in armed resistance.
Butler: 'Palestinians fight against a colonial power'
Butler said that they had to acknowledge the political structure from which the “uprising” emerged and that identifying the October 7 attacks as only or primarily antisemitic this would be obscured.
She noted that Israelis point to the murder of Israeli Jews as evidence that Palestinian terrorists hate Jews, when in fact it was just that they were fighting a colonial power. If it were a different colonial power, they would also fight them and it wouldn’t be considered antisemitism. Identifying with attacks as Nazi-like erased history and commits to a fantasy of Jewish suffering for the purposes of defending state violence, said Butler.
During the panel, Butler blamed anti-Zionist antisemitism on Israel, saying “If the world is asked to accept the fact the State of Israel represents the Jewish people, should we be surprised if many people think that the Jewish people are the state of Israel?”
Butler joked that she would “get in trouble” for her comments, but that the crowd would defend her.
On Monday in a Club de Mediapart blog post, Butler said that she sought to clarify her remarks, and condemned Hamas atrocities, but that the decades of violence by Israel that preceded October 7 also grieved her, and the story told had to begin decades earlier. She also said that the “murders” of Gazans by Israelis during the current war, “carried out without shame or restraint, deserve just as much condemnation.”
Butler said that while “antisemitism can clearly be heard in the recordings,” the main motivation of Hamas “was to challenge a colonial military power, to show that they were capable of incurring into Israeli territory, of killing and destroying, of hitting Israel where it would hurt. The result was a series of atrocities.”
Antisemitism and anti-Arab racism need to be fought in the same way, according to Butler.
“The Hamas attack in October came from the armed faction of a political party that administers Gaza and I remain willing to describe this attack as a form of armed resistance to colonization and the ongoing siege and dispossession. This is not to glorify their atrocities. And this in no way means that I support Hamas’s actions or that I consider their actions to be justified,” Butler wrote.
“Not all forms of ‘resistance’ are justified, and some, like these, truly call for condemnation. The sexual violence committed by Hamas and documented by the UN report is serious and inexcusable.”
Butler had said in December, “Whether or not there is documentation for the claims made about the rape of Israeli women, if there is documentation then we deplore that, there is no question, but we want to see that documentation and we want to know that it is right. There is no crime in insisting that we get that documentation.”
She dismissed the idea that feminism should take the side of Israel, and called to reject stereotypes about Palestinian men and boys.
“Feminism, queer mobilization, trans mobilization have to all be in solidarity with Palestine now, because we all suffer from forms of state and regulatory violence that makes our live unlivable or makes us have to fight for our lives,” Butler had said, going on to accuse the IDF of femicide in Gaza.
Tzedek decried what they said was slander by Le Figaro in a March 5 article on Butler’s comments, saying that they took her remarks out of context.
“No doubt, these journalists and trolls are delighted to see Judith Butler, despite the worldwide recognition of her contribution to intellectual debate, attacked and threatened, because what they fear most is thought and debate,” Tzedek said in a social media post last Thursday.
Tzedek also decried censorship when the mayor’s office allegedly exerted pressure on the Cirque Électrique venue not to host the original December 6 Paris event, when Butler said on March 3 that the mayor’s office said it had feared for public safety. She said that if there were a threat it came from “ultra-Zionists” who wanted to silence views critical of their own.
During the panel Butler promoted the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, which seeks the ostracization, deplatforming, and deassociation of anything connected to Israel in order to pressure the Jewish state into accepting its policy prescriptions. Butler said that BDS didn’t target individuals on the basis of nationality, but targeted corporations and institutions complicit with the State of Israel.