The Mate Fallacy: Do People - Hamas - Have 'Agency'
What is it about Israel and western intellectual and religious culture that let them get away with the Gaza genocide?
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For more than half of the 90 minutes duration in ‘Gaza Update with Norman Finkelstein’, the comparison was made between the Nat Turner November 1831 anti-White rebellion and, some 190 years later, the Hamas anti-Israel resistance breakout in Gaza on Oct 7, 2023.
Listen to the program Useful Idiots, Podcast Oct 24, 2023, or see on YouTube. Relevant parts are at time marker 19:09 and 21:57, and especially onwards at 33:12 that marks the exchange between Finkelstein and Aaron Mate, one of the two program hosts. Excerpts:
At 33:12. Mate: “Hamas unlike slaves had some power, they had some authority, they they were the rulers of Gaza. They're backed by a foreign patron, they have money coming … and it strikes me they have more freedom of choice than [the US] slaves [of 1831] did. I understand there's a long history [behind the Hamas Oct 7 assault]; I'm very familiar with Hamas trying to moderate its position, [example] accepting a two-state solution tacitly still being rejected by Israel, and so I understand that they're they were put in a really difficult position, even when they try to engage with diplomacy, all that gets shunned. I know all that but, unlike slaves, they do have some authority. They rule over the [Gaza] Strip….”
At 1:02:47. Finkelstein: It is fashionable nowadays to speak of a victim's agency but one must be realistic about the constraints imposed, by objective circumstances, on such agency. Frederick Douglas could reclaim his manhood by striking back at a slave master who viciously abused him. Nelson Mandela could retain his dignity in jail despite conditions calibrated to humiliate and degrade him. These were exceptional individuals (who didn’t kill), Douglas and Mandela.”
At 1:04:03. Mate: “…I got that and, again, you know I think we've debated this issue enough. But personally I distinguish between the Hamas leadership and the civilian population of Gaza when it comes to analogies [between] slaves, the Warsaw ghettoes and [Gaza] civilians [on the one hand and slaves] to the leadership [on the other]. Even in the case of leadership of Hamas I know there's been different factions, an armed wing, the political wing, and within them all sorts of different factions and different visions for strategy. So I don't even speak of them as a monolith but anyway … I've said many times I'm not defending them. I don't believe the core issue [?] is about them. I agree with that for sure I don't think it's about them, so I'm not going to be distracted by those 1,500 Hamas militants who were killed. I don't think of them as Hamas [though] like people who [were] ideologically driven. Who knows [what drove them to breakout and kill Israelis.]
Central to their arguments is the issue of “agency” or, synonymously, individual volition. But, before that, are two brief, outside observations into the characteristic qualities of western styles of political engagement. To these we will cut to the chase without explanation or qualification:
a) It is the western obsession with winning an argument and, in its inverse, the fear of losing one. Hence, one finds, as in classroom student papers and in online quarrels, this flow of western conversation: plant your flag in your castle and let fly (Mate: “I know all that but…”). An obvious source of this style is Cartesian deductive logic, wherein everything flows from the western, all-knowing Self. Which presumes, falsely, that in a person is the penultimate epistemological source of knowledge and truth.
b) It is the notion of “agree to disagree”, manifested in Mate’s “I think we've debated this issue enough”. From whence had Mate’s dismissive way of closing an argument come? Throughout his remarks, he acknowledges the counterfactual points. After that, comes the “but”, a form of argument premised on the street inherited wisdom that there’re “two sides to a story”. Going down this pathway invariably and always, without exception, leads Mate to never ever cross the threshold in accepting the truth of any argument to the contrary. Consequentially, he will never see that truth has only one side, not two. Any other side of truth is called falsehood.
Hence, we see and hear in Mikhaila Peterson’s ‘Israel/Palestine: The History and What’s Real? Opposing Views with Norman Finkelstein and David Brog’, Oct. 21, this perverse line, “bringing people who are opposite in their beliefs”. If beliefs are constantly in opposition, then no truth could possibly come of that opposition. If not possible why therefore even bother. Better still is, to each his own. Because western rationality have turned into matters of contesting “opposite beliefs”, rather than a straightforward enunciating of a truth, David Brog will always be excused for mouthing lies as his “right” to hold another belief or “opinion” when his words are neither beliefs nor opinions but pure, unadulterated voodoo nonsense. It’s a waste of time spent listening to him.
The Dao of Agency
Now, back to the issue of “agency”, which is, the sole possession of one’s Will with the unfettered freedom to exercise the same; in Gaza’s case, to choose methods of rebellion from two or more options. A corollary of this agency is, the western penchant to assign blame.
In Chinese philosophical discourse (道德經, daodejing.2), we never look at “agency” as an arbiter of a decision, much less to assign blame. This is because determining agency is like asking a mother is she had willingly cared for, in order to bring up, her baby child. Does the mother have “agency” or not?
That’s not a trivial question question and it is, intuitively, more profound than is banal and redundant. It’s also not a useful question to assign causation because we are raised (in the daodejing) not to look at events and phenomena like as these are standalone facts. If not standalone, then the inverse of, or the flipside of, “agency” would then be “non-agency”.
The way to picture see inversion or, in another phrasing, its yinyang 阴阳 dichotomy, is to see its abstracted or material quality of a fact. Analogously, hence, short and long, day and night, high and low, being and non-being, mountains and valleys, can only exists one dependent on the other, as opposed to independently separate and distinct occurrences. What, therefore, constitutes non-agency if not the absence of agency?
If it is valid to assert Hamas has agency, it is equally valid then to ask if Hamas has non-agency. If this seems like tautology (‘a bachelor is an unmarried man’), therefore fallacious(?), then the circularity breaks off instantly the moment we look at the elements contained in an “agency”, any agency. There is, foremost, for example, the “Self” without whom agency could not be acted out; there are concepts of “freedom” and “Will” without any of which agency could not be assigned; and there are “choices” without which the Self could not manifest either its Will or freedom of the Will.
Framed in the way described above, Mate’s commonly understood notion of “agency” collapses completely in practice, in definition and in its epistemological origin. We immediately see that many “constraints” (Finkelstein’s word) intervene in Mate’s “agency”, to wit Self, freedom, Will, choices. Restated another way, freedom, choices and such elements of “agency”, for any to work or to mean anything at all, have to exist in the infinite if agency is not turn into non-agency.
All this raises the equally valid flipside question: Has Hamas non-agency because, without those “constraints” just cited, then agency is never possible. That is, constraints are part and parcel of “agency”.
Mate’s Fallacy
Mate’s premise — Hamas acts out of its “agency” — is astounding in its syllogism when he takes it as if it were factual as an argument starting point. Astounding because it’s also entirely plausible that Hamas on Oct 7 wasn’t acting on “agency” but acting to claim it. That is, put another way, Hamas had lost agency — Self, freedom, etc — but had acted to wrest it back from Israel.
Summed up thus in the English mouthful of spittle above is that “agency” for Hamas, was never a realistic proposition just like freedom was never for it to be realistic. These things are not there to begin with.
If Hamas had what’s known what Mate’s calls as “agency” then its negation, non-agency, would cancel out Oct 7: no action would be required to claim agency. No agency would be possible without non-agency, freedom impossible without non-freedom just as day would not be recognizable without night, or to say a stick is long without another being short.
The opposite of a slave is not a free man — how could the Master be free anyway if his own life is wedded to the slavery in another man? Hamas is enslaved by dint of fact that his life is not his but Israel’s so that the opposite of a slave is the natural, uncontested Self.
That, then, was Mate’s fundamental source of error: to presume as incontrovertible factual premise that the Hamas leadership has agency by relying on the further assumption they’re free, like he is “free”. Mate does not, or refuses to see that Hamas leaders, like Nat Turner and like the rest of Gaza’s people live lives not of self-volition but under artificial condition. So, they can only act out of those conditions and those are not the conditions Mate enjoys.
In another manner of speaking, Mate was applying his (personal?) set of western, White man conditions on Hamas leadership but not Hamas “civilians”. Why this distinction? Why does Mate introduces onto Hamas this hypocritical, double standard — and one is not talking of some woolly biblical morality but an application of actual, real life empirical standards.
Clearly, if the Gaza “civilian” world is not of their making then neither is Hamas leadership world. Neither one of their worlds have been for them to make or destroy. Israel took on that task for Palestinians, the day in 1948 when it formally installed itself on another man’s territory. After which all agency, or whatever that is there, was drained from Gaza, from including its leadership. The Ludwig Wittgenstein rule applies (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1921):
“The world is all that is the case. … The limits of my language means the limits of my world. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”
Why must Hamas leadership agency even be affixed to, measured by, and be determined by Mate’s freedom or agency benchmarks, and by his standards and conditions? Why does Mate keep insisting, time and again, on applying his White man’s standard on Hamas? Who does Mate think he is? Some colonial Master replacement determining other people’s world, their fate, their life and death, like the West has done to the world for 300 years and Israel to Gaza for 75?
This notion of “agency” is not academic, that is, one without ramifications and consequences. Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu and their western media propagandists repeatedly circulate the falsity that Hamas attacked on Oct 7 knowing full well that Israel would strike back, that is, kill even far, far more people in Gaza than Hamas could kill Israelis. They are saying that with full “agency”, Hamas had caused the present destruction of Gaza and, at present count, some 8,000 dead.
This is the same Mate inferential assertion made to Finkelstein: It’s Hamas fault thousands are dead in Gaza! By extension, therefore, Nat Turner is the ultimate cause of 200 Negro deaths in the 1831 November insurrection.
Finkelstein
Finkelstein is an exceptionally smart person, going especially by Chinese intellectual standards. (See PISA test scores.) So, what explains his inability to overturn Mate’s insistence about Hamas “agency”? The answer is inferred in Finkelstein:
It is fashionable nowadays to speak of a victim's agency but one must be realistic about the constraints imposed, by objective circumstances, on such agency.
Finkelstein lives in the same Wittgenstein world that is also Mate’s, all raised in and dieted out of the same intellectual, western cultural menu, sauced in and cooked up in biblical dogma. Finkelstein can only chew away at the rim of that Cartesian, Hegelian world, though he does manages, far, far better than Mate, to break out it.
That other, outside world which is Gaza can only be made available to him in what he sees, feels and, hence, argue over and rationalize. Even so, all that has to be on western terms. There’s no way he can experience the Gaza world spoken of by Wittgenstein because he isn’t part of it.
Within that Wittgenstein world in which Finkelstein operates, all are cut from the same cloth. It is, to his despair, a biblical voodoo world. (See, for example, When the Bible is used as Property Deed, Oct 14, 2023.) “America is finished,” he said in a 2022 interview. “Start learning Chinese.”
Being a western replica, Israel has no idea of state-making other than to use the tool of barbarian violence and mayhem. Their common culture make people to choose between God and Satan, between holy and sin, good and evil, salvation and eternal damnation, thus freeing themselves, like their God, all attendant consequences. This introduction of religious “agency” creates the inviolable trap with which God had left his creation. Isn’t this is what Israel, the US and Europe are doing to their joint creation named Gaza?
That, too, is another essential trust in Mate’s “agency”: the West made a biblical world, both in Israel and Palestine, in which agency is applicable only by the parameters and standards set solely by them.
Those are not standards of a Palestine world to which Mate applies his biblical “agency”. There is no Self in such an “agency” but a slave. It is working within this trap that Finkelstein has no refutation convincing to Mate, much less tear down the latter. So all Finkelstein can do is to mitigate against (“fashionable, realistic, constraints”) the biblical agency’s destructive power.
To render such an “agency” non-existent — in common day street parlance, total shit — is both to refute and deny the White man’s biblical god named Jesus. Only a handful have done so, to wit, one Friedrich Nietzsche when he declared God dead. Even so, the results of Nietzschean liberation have been disastrous in the western world, something that Finkelstein’s knows all too well when he speaks of woke culture.
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