When confronted by someone deploying identity thinking, a few easy clues give the game away. Identity thinking always starts with identifying you. Do you condemn Hamas? Do you believe that Israel has a right to defend itself? Do you love your country? Are you a radical left Marxist communist socialist fascist? The need to know what you identify as is an essential step in locating you ideologically. It is important for identity thinking to remain at the level of mythology, and this includes the way in which histories are told. Identity thinking is radically opposed to dialectical historical materialism because the latter always entails the risk of exposing the former as peddling myths as history.
Real anti-Semitism is of course also deeply rooted in identity thinking. To assume or proclaim that someone is evil because he or she is Jewish is of course anti-Semitic. Thus to explain the genocide in Gaza with reference to assumed “Jewish” characteristics of the perpetrators is definitely anti-Semitic. However, so is assuming or proclaiming that someone is evil because he or she is identified as a “self-hating-Jew” and therefore opposes Zionism or Jewish Supremacism. Those who are corrupted by identity thinking cannot see the symmetry here, because they are steeped in the proto-fascist political theology of Carl Schmitt: The political emerges from the distinction between friend and foe. The very conception of Jewish opposition to Zionism as “self-hating” is emotionally charged with hatred. Indeed, Zionism is itself an anti-Semitic ideology.
Identity thinking is affective and emotionally charged because it cannot handle anything outside the opposition between friend and foe. This is not just a phenomenon one can find among right wing extremists or ultra conservatives, but has also widely spread amongst so-called “liberals” and “progressives”. Identity politics is, for example, at the core of what has now been widely denounced as “wokism” and “multicultiuralism”.
Identity thinking assumes an underlying unity of genetics and mimetics, of biology and culture, of individuality and sociality (e.g. classified as class, gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation etc.). It thereby posits that an individual behaves in a certain way because of his or her identity. In a similar vein, it posits that an individual wants to be affirmed as having a certain identity because he or she already is a certain identity (as is the case of for example, transgender people). Whereas it is inevitable that in establishing socialities, identifications take place, this does not necessarily mean that these identifications must also constitute homogeneous and unified political communities (or communitas). For example, a position that is radically (that is, without exception) in favour of universal human rights does not require one to identify as human first. By extension, to oppose the genocide in Gaza because it is a violation of human rights, does not require one to be either Palestinian or anti-Semitic, let alone a supporter of Hamas. In this respect, it would perhaps be useful to relabel “Pro Palestinian Activism” as “Universal Human Rights Activism”. By the same token, the fact that those who vocally oppose the genocide in Gaza are being persecuted and prosecuted in for example Israel, Germany, the United Kingdom and the USA and are treated as (potential) Palestinian terrorists and enemies of the state, demonstrates that there is a process of Palestinianization taking place. Universal Human Rights have by default become a Palestinian issue.
Dialectical Historical Materialism should therefore have an interest in the genesis of identity thinking, not just to oppose it, but to dialectically work through it. Those who oppose kakistocracy will become palestinianized and treated accordingly, in the same way that those who opposed capitalism in the Weimar Republic are the same as those who ended up in the first concentration camps of the Third Reich and were later generally identified as Jews. It may not get this far this time round, of course, as History does repeat itself, but not in exactly the same way. The first time it is a tragedy; the second time it is a farce.
In our thousands in our millions, we are all Palestinians, however, is not a statement of identity thinking, but a statement of fact, (finally) exposing the façade of “International Law”. In all their justifications for supporting the genocide in Gaza, western nations have de facto admitted that Universal Human Rights never existed and will never exist. Palestinians have known this since 1948, but many (not all) of us have taken a bit longer to realize the truth behind Nelson Mandela’s statement that “we cannot be free until the Palestinians are free”. Collectively identifying as Palestinians today is the strongest rejection of identity politics that currently exists.
Disaffected Sociology 
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