Whilst such controversial statements may be the reason why many people have slated Zizek’s little book on a big topic, but Violence was to me hard-hitting and thought provoking. Yes, Zizek may have used these arguments before, and yes, he lacks empirical research and jumps too quickly from high to low culture; creating an effect more akin to a pyrotechnic display than an academic argument. But for its ability to prompt greater reflection on the deep and complex causes of violence in society today, this book is of value.

Zizek, as many of his readers already know, does not shy away from controversy, instead using it to grab attention and involve the reader in the argument. Although he prefers to cast ‘sideways glances’ at violence in each of his chapters, Zizek does not shrink from the reality of actual instantiations of violence that have faced us throughout history right up to those on the TV news every day: from French Revolutionary terror, the Holocaust, and Stalinist repression, to the horrifying events at Abu Ghraib. However, he is driven by a fierce desire to avoid fetishising violence, emphasising that graphic descriptions and gory horror stories sometimes end up appealing to us out of shock and fascination – leading to a preoccupation with the gruesome details of each instantiation of violence. Hence his sideways glances try to resist the allure of its horror and achieve a more dispassionate engagement that may help us to see the underlying causes more clearly.

Subjective and objective violence

This is not to ask that we stop feeling the horror that this ‘subjective’ violence naturally produces, but that we try to mitigate this momentarily, to avoid a fake urgency where we rush headlong into trying to stop subjective violence while continuing in our failure to understand, and then tackle, the causes of objective violence. He believes that we should ‘step back’ and ‘disentangle ourselves’ from what he calls ‘the fascinating lure’ of directly visible ‘subjective’ violence, such as ‘acts of crime and terror, civil unrest, and international conflict’, which is all ‘violence performed by a clearly identifiable agent’ [1]. Instead, he argues that we need to be able to ‘perceive the contours of the background that ’causes such outbursts in order to identify the objective violence that lurks here’ [1].

For example, he says that when the media ‘bombard us’ with the usual humanitarian crises we see on our televison screens we must remember that the very fact that this crisis has been covered instead of another is the result of complex and often, ‘behind the scenes’ struggle which concerns less proper humanitarian concerns, and more cultural, ideologico-political and economic considerations [2]. He gives an example of when Time Magazine ‘got it wrong’, using, for their cover story on 5 June 2006, the ongoing crisis in the Congo, where around 4 million people died in the last decade.

But none of what Zizek calls, ‘the usual humanitarian uproar’ followed, bar a few readers’ letters. He observes that it was as if ‘some kind of filtering mechanism blocked this news from achieving its full impact in our symbolic space’ [2]. He remarks, bitterly, that the magazine should have stuck to its more common topics, such as the plight of Muslim women, or victims of 9/11; even an Israeli/Palestinian clash, since ‘the death of a West Bank Palestinian child, not to mention an Israeli or an American, is mediatically worth thousands of times more than the death of a nameless Congolese’ [3]. Hence it is objective violence that sets the scene in which subjective violence is played out. Subjective violence is the effect, whereas objective violence is the cause.

These six glances enable Zizek to develop arguments that attack our contemporary socio-economic order from various perspectives. Firstly, he asserts that it is symptomatic of this political order that we are distracted from the urgency to attend to objective violence. Instead there is a vast predilection in modern liberal societies to oppose all forms of violence, alerting us in a flurry, to the urgent need of the latest natural disaster or humanitarian crisis that has been picked up by the media radar. Yet, he asks, if there is something suspicious about this enforced focus on subjective violence, for ‘by obliterating from view other forms of violence’ it is as if we are being forced to look at one thing, while the real root of the problem sneaks by, out of sight, behind us.

Liberal Communists

So Zizek develops his category of ‘liberal communists’ to refer to the liberal intelligentsia who have sold-out and accepted capitalist economics, doing good works while keeping the very system in place that makes this work necessary. He cites the ideology of these liberal communists as one where market and social responsibility can be reunited for mutual benefit, unveiling the shallowness and hypocrisy behind these ideals in descriptions of those who ‘give with one hand what they first took with the other’ [18] – like George Soros and Bill Gates, who Zizek claims, divide their time equally between personal pursuit of profit and humanitarian activities, without realising the self-eliminating nature of this routine, as they spend half their time contributing to promulgating a violent and destructive system, and the remaining to helping a few of its victims.

Zizek’s familiar argument emerges here, explaining that liberal communists go unnoticed in today’s society because when any ideology is at its strongest it simply becomes accepted and beyond dispute, part of the backdrop culture, the common sense of society: its ‘features, attitudes and norms of life are no longer perceived as ideologically marked’ and instead ‘appear … neutral, non-ideological, natural’ [31]. So despite liberal arguments to the contrary, we are not beyond politics – beyond right and left. Zizek highlights how our current era is marked by post-political ‘claims to leave behind the old ideological struggles and instead, focus on expert management and administration, while “bio-politics” designates the regulation of security and welfare of human live as its primary goal’ [34]. Yet he notes how these two goals overlap, for they neutralise challenges to the system and also take away the old objects of passion and feeling that ideologies used to command. He argues, that the only way to mobilise people, to make them passionate enough to act in whichever way suits the ‘powers that be’, is through fear. So, today’s so-called ‘end-state’ neutral bio-politics, is actually just a new politics of fear.

Zizek wants to shock and irritate until he wakes us up to this realisation, to make us change perspective just a little, so when ‘bombarded by the heart-warming news of a debt cancellation or a big humanitarian campaign to eradicate a dangerous epidemic’, we can see beneath the veil of decency and reveal the liberal communist and their violence that is at work underneath [32-3].

Another glance, this time to post-hurricane New Orleans and 2005 Paris riots, shows this raw expression of emotion from yet another side. What Zizek saw in these events was an expression of pure resentment: violence and anger with no requests or demands beyond being heard. Yet he says that the absence of a wider social project of which this was a part, is just another symptom of our liberal capitalist world. The protestors’ impotence and lack of cognitive mapping (the ability to link one’s actions to the wider context) show that the only outlet for our emotions and rage is violence, which can only express impotence: our impotence to act in any productive way to resolve the problem that is the socio-economic divide.

Thus he makes an impassioned plea to try to overcome the cruel injustices and poverty that cause resentment to spread and violence to flare. Focusing on the worrying plans to build a wall around the North African Spanish enclave of Melilla, to prevent its penetration by immigrants, Zizek remarks that, contra what he terms the ‘soft-hearted’ liberal view that we should tear down this wall, and all others to promote free migration, the true wall that needs to be torn down is the socio-economic divide, that is what provokes people to, desperately, try to escape their own world.

In the final apocalyptic chapter we finish the journey, coming from our beginning, at the unmasking of false anti-violence, to this manic, loosely constructed endorsement of emancipatory violence. But in this unacknowledged invoking of Derridian post-structuralism the violence is objective, that which is beyond the law, because it is establishing a new law. This is the sort of violence that is a breaking out of the old order, revolutionary, but not necessarily establishing a new order: simply a resistance of meaning – a pure act of resistance in the hope of overturning the structures that holds us captive today.

Writing off sources of inspiration

Despite my endorsement of this work, two broad problems emerge. Firstly, Zizek’s critique is not really about us, about citizens in Western democratic states, going about our lives, and facing difficult moral and ethical decisions every day. Instead, his critique is a critique of the media, of globalisation, of the anti-capitalist movement, of business, and of the academic classes: of their arguments, their lives and commitments. Indeed, such a critique is necessary, but it is perhaps also important to address and acknowledge its subject more explicitly, so that we can begin to turn the lens on those who promote our violent system, while also preventing disillusionment among those of us who may already think we are doing our level best to reveal the manipulation and control that is going on behind the headlines.

Instead by trying to sweep the whole world into one analysis in this book (although one can always turn to his other work for clarification and greater detail) Zizek risks over-simplifying the problem, and needlessly writing off possible sources of inspiration and strength for the anti-capitalist struggle. For example, rather than condemning all religious groups, charities, existing political mechanisms for welfare and redistribution, and support groups for vulnerable people, would it not be more sensible to cautiously weigh up and evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of the role that all such groups play in challenging the current hegemonic powers?

Secondly, by entitling his book ‘Violence’, and (over-)emphasising the violent roots of our current state of the world, I wonder if Zizek is not capitalising on the very fear that he accuses liberal capitalist culture of exploiting? Painting the world as one where the domain of violence has become equal to the domain of love seems defeatist, perverse, and quite frankly, untrue. Surely a better way to counter this may be to construct ways to develop solidarity and resistance rather than entrenching the inevitability of the very depths of violence to which our culture stoops?

So Obama is in the White House and Hillary Clinton has arrived in Israel. As I write, we are waiting to discover how the US attitude to the Middle East is going to change, and we can only hope, after New Year horrors in Gaza, that the change will be for the better.

For those like me, still confused about why the theatre of suffering continues in Israel, Mark LeVine’s new book Impossible Peace offers an accessible entry point into the complicated world that is the politics of Israel/Palestine. Part of the ‘since 1989′ series from Zed books, it traces the way that the politics of the Middle East has been affected by the post-Cold War ‘new world order’ but also shows how the roots of the conflict go right back through the colonial era to the days of the Ottoman empire.

LeVine argues that the Israel/Palestine ‘peace’ process, officially dated from the Oslo accords of the early 1990s but rooted in the 1979 Camp David peace agreement, was doomed from the very beginning. He shows how the increasing entrenchment of Jewish settlers, in contrast with a continual chipping away at the Palestinian infrastructure, economy and society, was neglected by the accords, which instead served to further strengthen the Israeli state at the expense of the Palestinian people.

LeVine argues that ‘instead of grounding the peace process in an honest assessment of the historical processes that produced the current situation, Israelis, Americans, and to a certain extent, the PLO elite that negotiated the accords and benefited from them operated within a series of myths – about the ability to escape history, about the ability of economic processes to render political and territorial issues ‘irrelevant’, about the viability of “ending” a conflict without fairly addressing its underlying causes’. He argues that this preponderance to ignore the facts has led to an agreement worth little more than the paper it is written on

LeVine assesses the various fronts of the conflict, focusing on the three key topics of land settlement; economic development and separation of the Israeli and Palestinian economies, and the growing power of socio-religious movements in the two societies. He concludes with an assessment of the developing role of civil societies, NGOs, and the discourse of violence in the attempts to forge a path towards peace to show what possibilities for peace may exist already and could be developed.

As regards the issue of land, LeVine argues that ‘an Israeli matrix of control has slowly been unfolded over the Palestinians and the land of Israel/Palestine to create several overlapping layers of control over all aspects of Palestinian movement. The first layer is actual physical control comprising settlements, and their extended master plans, bypass roads, military installations, industrial parks, closed security zones and control of nature reserves and aquifers. The second layer is the bureaucratic and legal systems that entangle the Palestinian population in a tight web of restrictions that makes it difficult to buy, build on, develop or even have access to their lands. Finally, the third layer involves the use of violence to maintain control over the matrix, particularly the military occupation itself, and the large-scale imprisonment and violence that go with it’.

Secondly, this physical encroachment is accompanied by the separation of the Israeli and Palestinian economies. LeVine argues that the market place has become a symbolic space into which the Israel/Palestine battle can be advanced. He shows that by separating the economies it has become possible for a controlled squeezing of the Palestinians’ economic space in order to further weaken them and prevent resistance.

Thirdly, LeVine traces the role of socio-religious movements in both Israeli and Palestinian societies to show how factional politics on both sides has led to stalemate and impotence in the face of the increasing challenge to peace.

It is only in this section that LeVine for the first time begins to turn the spotlight on the Palestinian people too. Obviously they have suffered much injustice and been continuously weakened over the decades. Yet I became increasingly aware, as I read, of the lack of accountability on the Palestinian side and their failure to stand together in the face of the Israeli onslaught. LeVine notes the inability of the Palestinian elite to represent the Palestinian majority, the problems of corruption in the PA (Palestinian Authority) and the factions within the Palestinian sides – for example, growing tensions between the PA and the PLC (Palestinian Legislative Council) and between both of these and the NGO community.

It seems that whenever peace is to be negotiated the Palestinian people are let down again by the few who want to prove themselves, at the expense of the many. There still seems a lot to be done on the Palestinian side to come together as a united force, particularly with regard to women’s rights. Although LeVine does briefly touch on this subject and devotes space to explaining the internal difficulties of the Palestinian ruling bodies, it would have been useful to have more information on Palestinian power structures and society and more detail on their responses to Israeli policies as well.

Despite my curiosity on this point, LeVine’s book does successfully show the many reasons why the Oslo peace process was never really able to get off the ground. He manages to unravel the complicated tangle of broken promises, internal wrangles, violence, corruption and economic warfare in such a way as to paint a clear and detailed picture of the challenges that have plagued the peace process and will likely continue to do so.

Most enlightening and worrying, however, was the assertion that Israel/Palestine must be acknowledged as a country of apartheid and ethnocracy, more entrenched every day by the growing separation wall. This is a shocking fact that is rarely articulated in such a stark way. If the ongoing violence and suffering has so far failed to convince, this chilling fact of physical apartheid makes us realise that there are no grounds whatsoever upon which the Israel/Palestine conflict can be tolerated by the international community any longer.

Overall LeVine’s book offers an approachable and detailed account, which succeeds to argue that the peace process was over before it began. In making this argument he succeeds in tracing the continuing changes through which the Jewish population has become further entrenched whilst the non-Jewish population has found itself increasingly marginalised.

So where to now? LeVine’s book is essential reading for anyone discussing the attitude of the Obama administration to the Middle East. It shows that if a peace is to be forged it is necessary to face up to the past as honestly as possible, with both sides admitting their mistakes. It will also be imperative that the economic factors are taken in to consideration with the development of the Palestinian economy recognised as a crucial factor, as well as the acknowledgement that the inherent violence and division of neo-liberal economic policies in both the Israeli and Palestinian economies, can only wreak more damage, and must be replaced with more sensitive, fair, and far-sighted models.

In LeVine’s words, ‘If there is ever to be a just and lasting peace in the Holy Land both Israelis and Palestinians will have to escape from the burdens of their shared yet conflicted histories and imagine new identities and new forms of citizenship that can provide a decent life, with dignity, security and hope for the future for both peoples. Until that happens, Oslo’s legacy will be more blood and tears.’