TERROR in the heart of the city! The nefarious PROFESSOR SOPHISTICO has attacked the famous GOLDSCHMITT MANOR, fabulous home of MAYA GOLDSCHMITT, the city’s LEATHERIEST HEIRESS! The villain’s attack comes during a SWANKY SOIRÉE for investors in METZITZAH SYSTEMS, the high-tech Israeli arms manufacturer responsible for the BABYMASHER 3000, a loitering munition used to DEVASTATING EFFECT in maternity wards across the Gaza Strip! PROFESSOR SOPHISTICO, an adjunct in COMPARATIVE LITERATURE at the local university, has barricaded himself into the OPULENT BALLROOM at GOLDSCHMITT MANOR with five hostages! These are MAYA GOLDSCHMITT herself, billionaire playboy BRICK KOPF, local philanthropist RONNY LUFTMENSCH, beloved TV personality SUSAN PLAPEL, and OMER BALOG, the brilliant bald-headed boffin CTO of METZITZAH SYSTEMS! The devious PROFESSOR has wired his hostages with EXPLOSIVES—simply for the crime of BEING JEWISH! The bombs are attached to a DEAD MAN’S SWITCH, meaning that if the POLICE SNIPERS arranged around GOLDSCHMITT MANOR take a shot, all of SOPHISTICO’s hostages will POP LIKE WET CONFETTI! With no other recourse, the authorities have sent in the bumbling JIM PLAYNE, amateur hostage negotiator, to try to talk the CRAZED PROFESSOR down! Will PLAYNE manage to make a cogent case against INDIVIDUAL ACTS OF POLITICAL VIOLENCE as a LEGITIMATE FORM OF RESISTANCE? Or will he himself end up being seduced by the MAD PROFESSOR’S DEMENTED IDEOLOGY? Read on to find out…
PLAYNE: Nice barricades you’ve got here.
SOPHISTICO: Thanks.
PLAYNE: You’ve put all these bits of wood together very precisely. It looks great. If I were Maya Goldschmitt I’d keep them up afterwards.
SOPHISTICO: I watch Japanese woodworking on TikTok. It’s relaxing.
PLAYNE: Yeah?
SOPHISTICO: It’s called sashimono. They do joinery without any nails or glue. It all rests on these highly complex joints carved using simple chisels called nomi. I can show you some videos if you like.
PLAYNE: That’d be—maybe afterwards? You’ve also—it looks like you’ve taken a couple of hostages here.
SOPHISTICO: I’m striking back against the machinery of death.
HOSTAGES: [Indistinct panicked mumbling through their gags]
PLAYNE: And how are we feeling about this? Any, you know, regrets?
SOPHISTICO: Pretty good, to be honest.
PLAYNE: Alright. Mind walking me through how we got here?
SOPHISTICO: Well, basically how it started was that I couldn’t sleep. Every day, I watch videos of what’s happening in Gaza. The most horrible, horrible stuff. The other day I saw a father holding up half of his daughter. Half of a little girl. An Israeli bomb had exploded inside their house and it just cut her body in half. She’d never hurt anyone. Or there’s videos of babies, crying babies with exposed ribcages. They don’t understand why they can’t have any food. Every day it’s like this. There’s been an airstrike on a school. There’s been a team of medics shot one by one and buried in a mass grave. They’ve gunned down dozens of hungry people trying to get food. They targeted the home of a paediatrician and killed nine of her children. Kids she loved and cared for all their lives, and Israel wiped them all out in an instant. For no reason. So I see all of this happening, and then I can’t sleep. I keep lying in bed, thinking about it, until it’s five, six in the morning. How am I supposed to sleep in my warm bed, in my safe home, while this is happening to my fellow human beings? How can anyone just go about their normal lives when we’re watching a live-streamed genocide, twenty-four hours a day? I think the reason I couldn’t sleep was my conscience. It was telling me I had a duty to do something. So this is me doing something.
PLAYNE: You watch snuff films before bed and then you can’t sleep.
SOPHISTICO: Yeah. Do you think I should just ignore it? Pretend it isn’t happening? Wall myself off?
PLAYNE: No, no. Just saying. Let’s go back. You said you had a duty to do something. But there’s lots of ways of doing something. You could have, you know, marched—
SOPHISTICO: Ha. Of course they’d send a lib. Look, imagine this. Imagine it isn’t Gaza. Let’s say I’m right here, going into people’s houses with a gun—
PLAYNE: Well, you are right here, going into people’s houses with a gun.
SOPHISTICO: Let me finish. Imagine I go into your house at night and [making gun fingers] bang, I murder your wife. Bang, murder your son. While they’re sleeping. Then I take out a saw and cut your daughter in half. Next night, I do it again, to your neighbour. And the next night, and the night after that, for nearly two years, and the police do absolutely nothing to stop me. In fact, they’re supplying me with ammunition. And then in the daytime, they let me go on the TV and explain that I had to do it because those kids made me feel unsafe, and by the way I’m the most moral man in town, and if you have any problem with me breaking into houses and wiping out families, you’re some kind of bigot. I keep getting away with it, and I keep killing. What would you do in that situation? Do you think you’d sleep well at night? Would you choose non-violence? Would you go on a protest march against me? Write a letter to the Mayor? Fight against hatred with the power of love? Or would you do whatever it took to stop me before I killed again?
PLAYNE: I’m not sure it’s the same.
SOPHISTICO: No. Because in my thought experiment it’s happening here, and in reality it’s happening somewhere else. A lot of people just don’t view Palestinians as fully human. When their children are cut in half it doesn’t matter. But I refuse to care less about someone’s life just because they live far away.
PLAYNE: I guess what I meant is that, like I said, you really are going into people’s houses with a gun. You say you’re so horrified by violence, but here you are, committing acts of violence.
SOPHISTICO: OK, now we’re getting into it. You’re against violence? All violence?
PLAYNE: Yes. I think so.
SOPHISTICO: But right now there’s snipers pointing guns at me through the window. I don’t think you want them to take me out, I’m sure you’d prefer it if everyone could leave this room alive. But if they shot me in the middle of an active hostage situation, I don’t think you’d be morally outraged. So there’s clearly some violence you’re willing to accept and some violence you’re not.
PLAYNE: That’s true.
SOPHISTICO: So what’s the difference between acceptable and unacceptable violence?
PLAYNE: Well, the police, they’ve got legal authority—
SOPHISTICO: Exactly. Their violence is legitimate. It comes from the state. The state can send people to prison, but when I keep people in a room against their will it’s hostage-taking. If the state thinks parents are doing a bad job, it can kidnap their children; I can’t. And Israel is a state, an internationally recognised sovereign power, which is why it’s allowed to cut little girls in half, and private citizens are not. But there is such a thing in international law as the right to resist. Did you know that? The Universal Declaration of Human Rights says that we ‘have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression.’ So illegitimate individual violence is actually legitimate under the law. The distinction contradicts itself. So what else? How else do you tell the difference between acceptable and unacceptable violence?
PLAYNE: I don’t know.
HOSTAGES: [Muffled sounds of alarm getting louder]
PLAYNE: But look, the police wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t walked into a party full of people and started pointing guns at them. We’re trying to put an end to violence. That’s just not the same as deliberately starting it.
SOPHISTICO: Sure.
PLAYNE: So why don’t we try, maybe, letting one of the hostages—
SOPHISTICO: But I didn’t initiate the violence here. Every single one of these people is an investor in Metzitzah Systems. They are all making money out of a campaign of mass slaughter being waged on the other side of the world. I’m just responding. The violence is already taking place, and I’m the one trying to end it. Similarly, the violence on October 7th was a response to decades of illegal blockade, occupation, and colonisation against the people of Palestine. The distinction between initiating violence and responding with violence also doesn’t hold. There’s always a precedent.
PLAYNE: So why don’t you support the war then?
SOPHISTICO: What do you mean?
PLAYNE: You say this violence is justified by a previous act of violence. So doesn’t that apply to Israeli violence as well? How do you tell the difference between good and bad violence?
SOPHISTICO: I was getting there.
PLAYNE: Go on, then.
SOPHISTICO: Acceptable violence is the violence that liberates the oppressed from their oppression. Liberals like you only accept violence when it’s ‘legitimate,’ in other words, when it’s used by the established order to crush and pacify the powerless. I’m the opposite.
PLAYNE: Right.
SOPHISTICO: Good, isn’t it?
PLAYNE: I’m thinking about it. I worry it might have some holes.
SOPHISTICO: Like what?
PLAYNE: I mean, do you really think that’s what you’re doing? Liberating the oppressed from their oppression?
SOPHISTICO: I’m trying.
PLAYNE: I don’t know if I buy it. If you were really serious about liberating the oppressed, you wouldn’t be taking hostages and hooking them up to explosives. Let’s say our conversation here ends badly, and you blow up all these people here—
HOSTAGES: [Squirming in panic]
PLAYNE: —what do you think happens next? Let me tell you. Everyone you hate—they get to be the victim now. You’ve just given them a big gory piece of evidence that they’re the oppressed, not you, which means their violence is justified, not yours. These categories are more malleable than you think. And a lot of people will start agreeing with them, because most people don’t want to be on the same side as a crazy killer. So everyone who’s been trying to do the serious work of advocating for Palestine now has to deal with the PR nightmare another violent extremist in their ranks. There are reams of evidence that this kind of violent action is almost always counterproductive. Plus, just like you said, every violent act provokes a violent response. How do you think the Israelis will respond to this? Will they bomb Gaza less? Do you really think this will put a stop to the cycle of violence? It seems to me that all you’ve done is snuffed out five human lives forever, and made things worse for the people you claim to care about in the process. And yourself, of course. You’re Merry Levov, blowing up a post office. Pointless waste.
SOPHISTICO: I see. So now you don’t think violence is bad. It’s just ineffective.
PLAYNE: Look, man, I’m a hostage negotiator. I’m just trying to get you to let these people go. If I can sell you on violence being bad, I’ll say that. If I can sell you on violence being ineffective, that works too. If I thought I could convince you that the established order isn’t so awful, I’d give it a shot.
SOPHISTICO: It’s difficult to have an honest discussion with someone who doesn’t really believe in anything.
PLAYNE: Does it matter what I believe? I just accept whatever’s been convincingly demonstrated to me. You should try it. You know I’m right.
SOPHISTICO: No. You’re not. Imagine this. It’s World War Two and your country is occupied by the Nazis. They’re carting away all the Jews and Roma to concentration camps. You watch it happen every day. Now, if you want, you can run away into the hills and join up with the partisans. Fight the Nazis. But the Nazis have a reprisals policy. For every one of their soldiers that the partisans kill, they will go into a village, line up ten civilians against a wall, and shoot them. So should you resist the Nazis? Maybe on your utilitarian calculus it doesn’t help, maybe it’s even actively harmful. But don’t you have a duty? When you’re facing such a brutal machinery of death, aren’t you personally obliged to throw absolutely everything you have against it, even your own body, to strike back just for a moment, to make sure that these people suffer just a little for what they’ve done, so there’s some kind of price for their actions, even if it’s ultimately futile, even if it doesn’t help, just so you didn’t stand by and let it happen? What would you do? Would you resist, or not?