By Andrei S. Markovits · Monday, April 29, 2024 The following essay is part of a special series of responses to recent events centered, for now, at Columbia University, and extending beyond its confines to include the wider array of societal problems that the disorder there symptomatizes. For details, see Gabriel Noah Brahm, “From Palestine Avenue to Morningside Heights.”—Gabriel Noah Brahm, Director of the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute’s Israel initiative The following text is an expanded English-language version of the German article “Palestine Avenue,” published in Konkret 2/24, pp. 38–39.
 I remember it well. It was in the spring of 1987 when I commenced my lecture in Osnabrück on the German left with these remarks: “So that we understand each other: Regardless of my heavy criticisms and profound objections to many facets of its current affairs, I fully accept the existence of the Federal Republic of Germany and do not want its destruction!” People looked at me as if I had lost my mind!
But I said: “Such a fundamental statement of situating the speaker’s normative orientation is de rigueur at the beginning of every discussion involving anything relating to Israeli politics, society, and culture. The very existence of the country has simply never been accepted as a matter of course. Thus, it must be affirmed in every case.” Nothing has changed in the ensuing forty years. None of the 193 UN members must experience this every day in the most varied discussions all over the world, be it about their politics or society, culture or food, language or habits. None of these items are legitimate in Israel’s case. Just witness the bitter conflicts involving “inauthentic” Israeli food and its alleged appropriation of “authentic” Palestinian food, conveniently forgetting that all foods everywhere are appropriations and amalgams of various cultures. The more appropriation, the better, I would argue. Look at how much better food in Germany has become by appropriating Italian, Turkish, and Greek food.
Following violent conflicts, hostile neighbors may not accept each other’s post-conflict existence for a while, but none have had the temporal length (seventy-five years and counting) or the spatial dimension (reaching across the globe, far from the respective country’s borders) that pertains in the case of Israel. Serbia may not accept the existence of Kosovo, nor Georgia that of Abkhazia, but either’s alleged nonexistence does not matter in a discussion about them in Nigeria or Thailand. What makes the Israeli situation so unique is that this ubiquitous unacceptance exists in all corners of the globe and among the most varied publics. Making it more pernicious still is that this unacceptance is perhaps more prominent in spaces of civil society than in those of governments. Even in the case of apartheid-ruled South Africa from the 1960s to the 1990s (with which Israel is always associated), it was South Africa’s apartheid regime that was anathema, not the country’s existence per se. One did not have to begin any discussion about South African apartheid by stating that one did not desire the destruction of South Africa as a country.
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By Telos Press · Friday, December 22, 2023 Now available: Shards and Specters of the New World Order, by Timothy W. Luke. Order the paperback edition today in our online store and save 20% by using the coupon code BOOKS20. Also available in Kindle ebook format at Amazon.com.
Shards and Specters of the New World Order: Casting Soviet and Post-Soviet Studies as Critique
by Timothy W. Luke
 From ideological dynamics in revolutionary Russia, cultural stagnation in the USSR, and ineffective Soviet governance in the 1980s to the USSR’s institutional collapse in 1991, the emergence of the Russian Federation under Boris Yeltsin, and Vladimir Putin’s wars in Ukraine since 2014, Timothy W. Luke’s Shards and Specters of the New World Order investigates how the geopolitical clout of the United States has worked to contain, but at other times sustain, the Soviet Union and later the Russian Federation. Luke’s critical studies also examine how Moscow’s strategies provoked radical Islamic resistance movements in Afghanistan and aided anti-Western client states, like Iraq and Syria, that threatened the New World Order envisioned in Washington after 1991.
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By David Pan · Wednesday, July 26, 2023 Telos 203 (Summer 2023): The Manifold Foundations of Human Rights is now available for purchase in our store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are also available in both print and online formats.
 One of the most disappointing human rights debacles in the last few years was the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan. For those who still take an interest, the human rights situation there has become horrendous, with Human Rights Watch documenting the denial of schooling and employment to women, extrajudicial killings, and torture. Moreover, in a severe rebuttal to those who supported the withdrawal, Taliban rule has created the conditions for a renewal of terrorist groups that can now develop and train in Afghanistan with impunity. There is also a good case to be made that the U.S. withdrawal there emboldened Putin to invade Ukraine, calculating that the United States and its allies no longer have the stomach for protracted conflicts in order to prevent human rights abuses. It may be that we have traded a low-grade conflict in Afghanistan for a high-intensity one in Ukraine. The lesson here is that the struggle for human rights, while beginning as a moral problem about our common responsibilities, can only be taken seriously when we consider its political ramifications. What do we owe to our fellow humans, and what sacrifices should we make in order to fulfill those responsibilities?
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By David Pan · Wednesday, July 5, 2023 In spite of the divided opinions concerning the Supreme Court’s ruling against affirmative action in college admissions, there is still solace in realizing that there is an underlying consensus that racial discrimination has no place in U.S. society. The primary dispute is about the means of achieving a society without racism.
The majority opinion of the Court is that discriminating by race not only is unjust but reinforces the discrimination that it is meant to eliminate. Rather than overturning precedent, as the dissenters claim, the Court reaffirms the idea of the injustice of discrimination established in a series of Supreme Court judgments. Judge Roberts cites one such case that affirms: “‘Distinctions between citizens solely because of their ancestry are by their very nature odious to a free people whose institutions are founded upon the doctrine of equality.’ Rice v. Cayetano, 528 U. S. 495, 517 (2000) (quoting Hirabayashi v. United States, 320 U. S. 81, 100 (1943)). That principle cannot be overridden except in the most extraordinary case.” Evaluating people by their race is clearly contrary to the idea of equal treatment established in such previous cases, and the majority opinion uses this long-held principle as the guide for its judgment.
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By Telos Press · Monday, April 3, 2023 In today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast, David Pan talks with Miles Yu about his article “Escape from Civilization’s Predicaments,” from Telos 201 (Winter 2022). An excerpt of the article appears here. In their conversation they discuss the main problems with using the idea of civilization as a way of understanding today’s geopolitical conflicts; the meaning of ideology and its effect on politics; why it is more important to think of ideology than of civilization as a way of understanding politics; how the inability of Americans to see the importance of ideology in the world has affected U.S. foreign policy; what kind of foreign policy would emerge out of the focus on ideology; why Marxism as an ideology has maintained its appeal both for countries such as China and for U.S. intellectuals; and what strategies the United States has in this ideological conflict. If your university has an online subscription to Telos, you can read the full article at the Telos Online website. For non-subscribers, learn how your university can begin a subscription to Telos at our library recommendation page. Print copies of Telos 201 are available for purchase in our online store.
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By John Croce-Renard · Monday, March 13, 2023 When the Supreme Court rules in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, it will surely declare that the use of racial preferences in higher education admissions violates the U.S. Constitution. There is some uncertainty about the precise shape its arguments will take, and their scope, but the basic outcome is clear enough. Here are seven reasons to welcome it from the standpoint of some traditional concerns of Telos.
First, a ruling against race-based affirmative action will diminish the material interests at stake in racial identity politics. It will thereby undercut the racialism that lies at the ideological heart of the liberal managerial establishment. Individual good intentions notwithstanding, the Tories of the managerial class use this insidious set of principles and rhetorical moves to justify their power and to bludgeon the working- and private sector middle classes.
Second, the ruling may enable colleges and universities to overcome the morally degrading culture of lies that the existence of racial preferences has spread throughout higher education, beginning in the elaborate charade that all applicants for admission or employment are judged by common criteria. It will help individual members of those communities to live in truth.
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