“Antisemitism of the Left”

More than in any other rich European state, the Austrian political landscape is increasingly defined by preemptive or what has been called “subjunctive” adoption of far-right policy and dogma. This can be seen most clearly in the attacks on “left-wing antisemitism” by Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP) minister for the EU and constitution Karoline Edtstadler, who speaks picturesquely about an antisemitic “pendulum,” which has swung with mechanical inevitability from political right to left.

Her partiality for this theory — contradicted even by statistics that count support for the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement as antisemitic by default — is accompanied by practical efforts to outflank to the Right even the historically Nazi and antisemitic FPÖ, specifically on anti-terror surveillance measures directed mainly against Muslims. Theories and allegations of left-wing antisemitism are equally prevalent among left-liberals, who have also done much to circulate more everyday forms of Islamophobia, reinforcing a far-right anti-immigrant agenda that is today expressed most prominently in calls for “comprehensive remigration.”

A similar preemptive adaptation can be detected in the cultural sphere, in attempts to discipline Southwest Asian and North African (SWANA region) artists and researchers for “unacceptable” political speech. This is a backlash against anti-colonial thinking often privately justified on pragmatic grounds, as an attempt to prevent supposed reputational harm to — and defunding of — liberal cultural institutions, and, therefore, as part of what is called a “strategy” against the far right.

Policing the Postcolonial Crisis

Nour Shantout is a Syrian Palestinian artist and researcher based in Vienna since 2015. Her work is about Palestinian embroidery and its relationship to practices of resistance. It’s about war, displacement, anti-imperialism, gender, and class. All of these things interact in the tradition of women’s labor that she examines, which allows her to depict complexities of Palestinian social history — in Palestine, in the refugee camps of Lebanon, and in the destroyed refugee camp of Yarmouk, Syria — with a rare level of precision.

On October 9, Shantout became the latest of several researchers to be “canceled” by the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, after she reshared an Instagram post in her stories, for less than twenty-four hours. The post, which was written by Disorientalising, an Instagram account with 76,000 followers, and which was widely reshared after Israel stepped up its bombing campaign in Lebanon, states “‘death to israel’ is not just a threat. it is a moral imperative and the only acceptable solution.”

Shantout was swiftly removed from her PhD program and her funding was withdrawn. In her account of these developments, circulated in academic networks in Vienna, she described how her request for due process was dismissed by the lawyer for the funding body, the Austrian Academy of Sciences, on the basis that she was guilty of incitement to racial hatred, and that her actions “contradicted decency and morality.” The termination of her PhD was confirmed at a meeting that lasted less than ten minutes and was attended by University rector Johan F. Hartle, professor of postcolonial studies Christian Kravagna, and Sabeth Buchmann, the supervisor of her PhD project, all of whom are white Germans whose own work deals, directly or indirectly, with postcolonial theory.

Elite Coalitions

Writing about contemporary US politics, the philosopher Alberto Toscano has recently noted that “a de facto elite coalition has come together — from complicit university presidents and culture war ideologues to billionaires and elected representatives of both parties — to affirm America’s commitment to Israeli impunity.”

A similar conjunction can be seen in Austrian state and cultural politics across the apparent divide of left and right. Toscano’s book Late Fascism helps us to think about the relevant dynamics, in which liberal institutions try to formally reproduce themselves in an increasingly hostile environment by preemptively evacuating themselves of any substantive content:

Emerging or intervening in a conjuncture of crisis . . . fascism mobilises non-contemporaneity (of identities, experiences, fantasies, and so on) around a nostalgic project of regeneration, palingenesis, rebirth, grounded in a view of the present as decadence, decay, degradation, consequent upon a defeat.

The FPÖ’s “nostalgic project of regeneration” could hardly be clearer. It is a project for the regeneration of a belligerently nationalist “Fortress Austria,” a racially homogenous society modeled on the Austria of the 1930s with the Volkskanzler at its helm. But “complicit university presidents” have their own nostalgic projects of regeneration. This may include the teaching of “postcolonialism” by an exclusively white faculty who can be guaranteed not to raise the question of whether there is a difference between violence against people, and a fundamental transformation of a violent, ethnic-chauvinist legal-political organization or state.

At stake in this latter scenario is the possible emergence of a democratic, inclusive, nonviolent alternative. But the nostalgic consensus in the Austrian university system forecloses this possibility. It attributes unambiguous meaning to anti-colonial others, while reserving the characteristics of complexity and ambiguity for itself alone.

Questions of Safety

The abrupt termination of Shantout’s studentship takes place in the wake of a number of similar cases, many of them also at Vienna’s Academy of Fine Arts. These include the cancellation of a lecture by the Palestinian queer theorist Walaa Alqaisiya in 2022, as well as a “Decolonial Encounters” event in June 2024, which was broken up by police after students attempted to reconvene it on the steps at the institution’s entrance.

Elsewhere in the city, in May, a video lecture by the Columbia University historian Rashid Khalidi at the University of Vienna was canceled by university authorities and had to take place informally outdoors. We were present for this lecture, and the spectacle of a professor giving a talk about human rights on Zoom, projected onto the wall of a university office and then fed via a webcam to the phones and computers of students on a lawn outside, was deeply bizarre. The indecipherable echo of scores of unsynced devices made Khalidi’s presentation almost impossible to follow, but it was a perfect metaphor for the phobic character of liberal anti-Palestinian politics, which was perhaps one of his points anyway.

Slightly earlier, the University of Vienna’s peaceful student encampment was dispersed by police after only a few days, while in an echo of the treatment of Shantout, protesting students at Vienna’s other major art school were mocked by the university’s own rector in the pages of the main national newspaper. Her opinion piece accused them of “distorting the discourse,” for speaking about the effects of the genocide on queer Palestinians.

This mixture of alarmism, ignorance, and managerial arrogance is divorced from reality, but it is also telling. Most of all it tells us something about the causes of anti-Palestinian repression, which is driven primarily by European racism, bureaucratic violence, and middle-class interest politics disguised as anti-fascist strategy. It is also premised for nostalgia — whether overtly fascist or liberal-institutional — for happier, more oblivious times past, rather than the presence or absence of a “countermajoritarian” memory culture.

The synthesis explains — but certainly doesn’t justify — the actions of even postcolonial and Marxist scholars whose internalization of the far-right threat is expressed as fear of their own Palestinian students. Palestinian artists are canceled and their funding withdrawn under the rubric of “safety,” without any thought about what this means for the safety of those who are thus stigmatized and excluded.

Shantout’s family lives in a neighborhood of Damascus that is under regular Israeli air attack. The question of safety is very real for her. But she was never given a real opportunity to discuss, clarify, retract, or refine.

Palestine and Internationalism

Today what Toscano calls a “late-fascist” political order does not have to involve the overthrow of the liberal state but need only fuse with it. The situation in Austria shows how ostensible fear of a fascist threat at home can become a perverse justification for this fusion. Just as much as in Germany, it shows how fascism advances via liberal institutional complicity for so long as it is not seen from a planetary perspective, in which the situation of Palestinians is now central.

Shantout is one target of what we might call “late-fascist” cultural politics; but so, too, is the very idea of something like “postcolonial studies” in an Austrian context, which in the present scenario threatens to become a simple contradiction in terms.

On March 8 of this year, one of us, caring for their partner during the final stages of her cancer, took an hour out to attend a splinter demonstration around the International Women’s Day protest in Vienna. The main protest had banned attendees from wearing keffiyehs. Shantout spoke at this splinter demo, where she delivered a speech about the need for international solidarity in feminist struggle. Rather than being treated as a scapegoat and a threat because of a single Instagram repost, she should be given the chance to explain to liberal “anti-fascists” what commitment to internationalism really means.