Xueqin's Blood Libel

Israel’s administration of a genocide is not a sacred rite.

The premise asserted by Prof Jiang Xueqin that the ongoing extermination campaign in Gaza constitutes a “ritual sacrifice” is a profound academic and methodological failure. It represents a categorical error that replaces the rigorous analysis of material power with a descent into theological fantasy. This framework is not merely incorrect; it is a disabling mystification that obscures the concrete political economy of settler-colonial violence.

By invoking archaic sacrificial rites and eschatological scripts, such an interpretation depoliticizes a thoroughly modern project of administrative mass killing, rendering it an inevitable, mythic drama rather than a contingent outcome of specific institutional and class forces. A correct analysis must begin by rejecting this entire conceptual apparatus. It must ground itself in a negative materialist framework that treats the state, its imperial patrons, and the logic of capital accumulation as the primary objects of inquiry. The task is not to decipher a hidden religious motive but to map the logistical, financial, and ideological infrastructure that makes the slaughter possible. The violence is not a sacrament performed for a hidden god; it is a technique of rule, a pedagogy of terror, and a function of a global system of domination. The goal here is to dismantle this sacrificial alibi and replace it with a disciplined, unsentimental anatomy of power. This requires stripping the halo from the gun and examining the material base upon which the entire edifice of violence rests, identifying its vulnerabilities not in scripture, but in its supply chains.

The core of the professor’s argument is that the mass killing of children and its public visibility are evidence of a sacrificial rite, this exemplifies the logical fallacy of begging the question. The conclusion is smuggled into the premise. The analysis begins by labeling the violence as “sacrifice” and then presents cherry-picked historical analogies, ranging from the Aztecs to the Romans, to support this predetermined conclusion. What is absent is the crucial connective tissue of a demonstrable argument. A rigorous method would first define the structural components of ritual sacrifice as a designated officiant, a bounded and symbolic performance, and a victim chosen to reaffirm a cosmic or social order, and then test whether the events in Gaza match this definition. They do not. Modern genocide is the antithesis of contained ritual; it is the systematic de-bounding of violence, the replacement of the singular priest with a diffuse administrative apparatus of bureaucrats, soldiers, and automated targeting systems. Its logic is not symbolic reaffirmation but the biopolitical and necropolitical management of a population deemed disposable. From the standpoint of a practical critique, the lecture proposes a universal law, “public mass killing of children equals ritual sacrifice,” that is immediately falsified by the material counterexample of its actual mechanics. The event is not an offering but an operation, guided not by liturgy but by targeting doctrines, logistical capacities, and the political calculus of land expropriation. The analytical failure is to mistake the ideological superstructure for the material base.

The public nature of the violence, its spectacular quality, is misinterpreted by the lecturer as evidence of a desire to be hated, a tactic to accelerate an apocalyptic confrontation. This psychologizes what is fundamentally a strategic and institutional phenomenon. The spectacle of punishment is a classic technology of colonial rule. Its function is not eschatological but pedagogical. For the colonized population, the public display of overwhelming and indiscriminate force is designed to terrorize, to demoralize, and to teach the futility of resistance. It is an infrastructural operation aimed at compelling displacement and submission. For the colonizing population and its allies, it serves to consolidate a shared identity through participation in a communal act of domination, normalizing atrocity, and reaffirming sovereignty. American lynchings, with their picnic atmospheres and photographic souvenirs, served precisely this dual function of terrorizing Black communities while reinforcing the white supremacist social order that underpinned a specific mode of production. The Israeli state’s actions are not a departure from this historical script but a continuation of it, updated with twenty-first-century military technology. The state does not want to be hated; it wants to be feared. The visibility of its violence is a calculated demonstration of impunity, a signal to both its subjects and its imperial patrons that it operates beyond the constraints of law and consequence, a privilege underwritten by the material support of the United States.

To attribute the motive for this violence to an extreme form of Jewish eschatology is to substitute an antisemitic spook for a materialist analysis of the ruling bloc and its imperial context. The motor of this project is not prophecy but political economy. The Israeli state operates as a militarized outpost of the American empire, a crucial node in the management of regional resources and the suppression of anti-imperialist movements. Its war economy is deeply integrated into the global arms market, with the occupied territories serving as a laboratory for developing, testing, and marketing new weapons and surveillance systems. The continuous process of settlement expansion is a straightforward project of primitive accumulation, expropriating land and resources to create new facts on the ground. These are the material interests that drive state policy. The analogy of an army fighting with a river at its back is fatally flawed because it ignores this imperial scaffolding. The Israeli state does not have a river at its back; it has the inexhaustible logistical and diplomatic might of the United States. This backing removes any meaningful external material constraint on its actions, creating the conditions for the very impunity that makes the spectacle of mass violence possible. The conflict is not a theological drama but a function of imperial geopolitics and the brutal logic of capitalist expansion into contested territory. The narratives of religious destiny are superstructural justifications, not the foundational cause.

The conflation of the Israeli state’s actions with Judaism or a singular Jewish theology is a dangerous and analytically bankrupt form of essentialism, a modern-day blood libel. It treats an entire, diverse population and a complex religious tradition as a monolithic entity driven by a single fanatical script. A materialist analysis, grounded in the concept of the ego as an “ensemble of social relations,” must reject this. The state is not a religion; it is an apparatus of class rule, a concrete set of institutions managed by a specific coalition of political elites, military commanders, security bureaucrats, and capitalist factions whose interests are tied to the settlement project and the defense industry. This ruling bloc deploys religious and nationalist rhetoric as an ideological tool to mobilize its domestic base, discipline dissent, and provide a coherent narrative for its actions. But this ideology is a weapon wielded by a class, not the disembodied will of a timeless faith. To mistake the tool for the actor is to fall into the trap set by the state itself, which seeks to immunize its political project from critique by wrapping it in the mantle of the sacred.

The spectacle of violence, while deployed as a tool of domination, is not a monologue. It is a contested terrain where the antithesis of resistance meets the state’s thesis of absolute power. The same digital networks that the state and its supporters might use to circulate images of destruction and humiliation are also used by Palestinians and their allies to broadcast evidence of war crimes, document resistance, and build global solidarity. Every video of a bombed hospital or a starving child functions as a signifier of resistance, a counterexample that challenges the state’s narrative of legitimacy. This clash does not produce a higher synthesis or resolution; it produces a new and more complex tactical field characterized by heightened narrative warfare. This superstructural battle- the fight over the meaning of the spectacle- has direct infrastructural consequences. It fuels the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, which targets the economic base of the occupation. It motivates direct action against arms factories and shipping lines that form the logistical backbone of the military. It provides the evidence used in international legal forums to challenge the state’s impunity. This demonstrates the crucial tactical duality of pairing superstructural negation, disrupting the legitimacy and security, with the infrastructural work of both disrupting the enemy’s material base and constructing autonomous networks of support and provision for the oppressed. The spectacle is not merely a tool of the powerful; it is the battlefield itself.

It is crucial to distinguish the administrative logic of genocide from the symbolic logic of sacrifice. Ritual sacrifice, in its anthropological context, is a fundamentally conservative act. It is a highly structured performance designed to reaffirm and stabilize an existing social and cosmic order by channeling violence through a single, sanctioned event. It operates by exception, and its power lies in its ability to contain. Genocide, conversely, is a revolutionary project of destruction. It does not reaffirm an order but seeks to annihilate one and replace it with another, typically by eliminating a population from a territory. It operates not by containing violence but by generalizing it, by transforming the exception into the rule. The authority to kill is diffused from a sacred officiant to the entire state apparatus and, in many cases, to the colonizing society itself. The logic at play in Gaza is not that of the altar but of the spreadsheet, the algorithm, and the demographic projection. It is a calculated, industrial process of making an entire population killable, of managing their systematic immiseration and death through blockade, bombardment, and engineered famine. This is the grammar of necropolitics, a thoroughly modern form of sovereignty that exercises power through the administration of death on a mass scale. To call this a “sacrifice” is to grant it a sacred, symbolic dignity it does not possess. It is simply an extermination.

The framework of “ritual sacrifice” takes a brutal, systematic, and politically motivated campaign of colonial violence and launders it through the language of ancient myth and inscrutable theology. This mystification serves the interests of the perpetrators by making their actions appear not as a series of deliberate political and military choices, but as the unfolding of a fated, tragic, and ultimately incomprehensible script. It deflects analysis away from the accountable agents such as politicians, generals, corporate executives, and towards abstract cultural or religious forces. The negative materialist method is the necessary antidote to this poison. It insists on a ruthless return to the material facts of the situation: the class interests at stake, the mechanics of imperial patronage, the profit motives of the arms industry, and the cold logic of population control. It rejects any analysis that terminates in a spook, whether that spook is God, Destiny, or an alleged collective psychosis. The purpose of theory is not to provide a comforting narrative but to forge a weapon for praxis. The task is to identify immediate, practical interventions that disrupt the material reproduction of this system of violence, rather than getting lost in allegorical interpretations that ultimately reinforce its perceived inevitability and power.

This is not to deny that mystical ideologies, such as certain strains of Kookist thought, can serve as potent fuel for the fire of colonial violence. These extremists are indeed mobilized by factions within the ruling bloc to sanctify their project and inspire fanaticism. An argument could even be constructed that these factions literally view their actions in Gaza as part of a grand ritual to reestablish a covenant. However, even if this argument were to withstand close scrutiny, it would still fail to grasp the materialist core of the issue. These mystical justifications function as a superstructural accelerant, not as the foundational engine of the project. The engine remains the material imperatives of land acquisition, resource control, geopolitical dominance, and the profit cycle of the military-industrial complex. The Kabbalistic fantasy is a powerful tool for motivating cadres and rationalizing atrocity, but it is a tool in service of a concrete political and economic enterprise. A materialist analysis subordinates the study of these ideologies to the study of the power structures they serve. The eschatology provides the soundtrack, but the imperial budget, the arms contracts, and the settlement grid provide the script. To focus on the former at the expense of the latter is to mistake the symptom for the disease, a fatal error in strategic diagnosis that leads only to inaction.

Our analysis must therefore terminate not in resignation before a seemingly timeless evil, but in the identification of immediate points of leverage. The conflict is not an unstoppable religious war but a political and economic struggle that can be influenced by material interventions. Effective action must embody the tactical duality of targeting both the superstructural narratives that grant legitimacy and the infrastructural systems that grant capacity.