Should We Not Hate?
(Originally written/revised Dec 2025/Jan 2026).
I don’t have the text to hand, but the answer in all its chilling simplicity has long sat with me. I probably read Imre Kertesz’s Fatelessness about fifteen years ago. In it, the young narrator, exhausted and emaciated, is making his way slowly back on foot from the death camp to his native Hungary when he is questioned by an inhabitant of a village en route. He explains where he has come from, the horrors of the conditions there, what kind of people his exterminators were. The villager asks him what he feels. “Hatred, mostly.”
The reply is almost banal. Which of us hasn’t felt, and vocalized, hatred, and that from a very young age, without ever being exposed to anything like a Nazi extermination camp? Don’t Buchenwald, Auschwitz, and Zeitz demand something more from language? But then how else would we expect someone who, because Jewish, has first been forced to labor in his homeland, under occupation and abetted by the indifference and sometimes complicity of his non-Jewish compatriots, before then being deported in cattle trucks to a place where he seems destined to pass from abuse to near starvation to eventual murder, alongside tens of thousands of others? “Hatred, mostly.” What could be more reasonable?
Aren’t we all taught not to hate? At the very least, not to say, “I hate…”? That hate is something we are against, like the well-intentioned signs with their ungainly syntax that sometimes appear on front lawns or billboards where I live: “Stop Asian hate!” “No to Jewish hate!”, understandably reducing the structural complexities of racism and discrimination to a single, primeval, reprehensible emotion. When the Palestinian doctor Izzeldin Abuelaish entitled his admirable memoir I Shall Not Hate, this was entirely consistent with his refusal to give up either his dignity or his optimism despite all the humiliations and sorrows heaped upon him and his people by the Israeli occupiers, including the death in a bombing of his three daughters and his niece. Surely, we should not hate.
These injustices, in their most recent and horrid Gazan form, are now widely and correctly recognized as genocide, not that their perpetrators seem particularly discouraged from perpetuating them. I do not know what Dr Abuelaish feels now; would he still title his book thus? Who could reasonably blame him if he no longer felt able to make such a defiant declaration?
We are against hate. For instance, here is a scene of hate: small groups of angry men and women, almost entirely white, waving or wearing national flags, gather outside hotels used to house asylum seekers in the United Kingdom, brandishing placards reading “send them back”, chanting “get them out” in unison as they smite the air with their fists.
Are these not exactly the sorts of acts we are against when we say “stop hate”? So far, so uncontroversial. But then…
— — Who are you, anyway?
— — I situate myself now in the United Kingdom because that is where I grew up, and though I have long been far away, I am not in the slightest bit detached. I not only follow the news, I feel it.
— — And what do you do about it?
— — I do respond, in the way I should. I wrote to my MP when I heard the news…
— — About what?
— — I wrote to my representative (yet to reply) about the appalling proposals laid before the British House of Commons by the Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, a racialized Muslim woman, child of immigrants, victim of racist abuse: refugees will not have the right to apply for “indefinite settled status” in the UK until they have been resident for twenty years, and will have their right to remain reviewed every thirty months, to be sent back to their home countries if deemed safe — “voluntary” deportations to Syria have already started; the right to family reunion is abolished; the legal duty of the government to provide financial support to destitute asylum seekers revoked, and those with assets may see them confiscated; the interpretation of Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights on inhuman and degrading treatment will be “tightened”; a handful of “talented” but “at risk” people from around the world will be given special visas to allow them to contribute to the British economy; sanctions are threatened against Angola, the DRC, and Namibia if they fail to cooperate. All this is justified by a slew of cherry-picked, decontextualized statistics and frequent appeals to the “division” of our “communities” by the existing asylum system, alleged to be a “pull factor” bringing migrants to the UK. Of the actual state of life in countries like Afghanistan, Eritrea, or Syria, of the traumas so many refugees have endured to get to Britain, of the contributions of decades of British policies in forging a world wracked by violence and injustice and a structural need for migration from its poorer to its wealthier parts, or of the immense wealth (economic and cultural) that generations of migrants have generated for Britain, while themselves becoming British: not a word.
Mahmood declares this is all about “securing our borders”, a slogan taken straight from the policy platform of the far right; of ending divisions: as if people both deeply vulnerable and full of courage in their search for refuge are the ones fomenting divisions, and not these “communities” of angry, racially homogeneous conspiracy theorists with their vile protests and online dissemination of misinformation and slanders, people whose leaders welcomed the new proposals as vindicating their approach.
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If this were not already insufferable, hot on its heels came the announcement that the Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, together with his Danish counterpart, a country already known for its “strict” rules on asylum seeking, a place that is prepared even to confiscate asylum seekers’ jewelry, and repeatedly held up as the model in British documents, wishes to alter the European Convention on Human Rights in order to stop “irregular migration”. On International Human Rights Day, a number of other European states, such as Italy, enthusiastically took up this suggestion, invoking, despite considerable evidence to the contrary, the specter of hordes of migrants unleashing waves of criminality and threatening European freedoms.
What do I feel, then? Not for the first, very probably for the fiftieth time, on reading about these developments, I wanted to explode. The new approach is arrayed in all the glory of the usual bland, technocratic lexemes: “reform” and “modernization”. Terms that by our day are almost empty of meaning, hollow descriptions masquerading as justification. As if every ratcheting up of the repressive state apparatus against a vulnerable population might not only be made to sound plausible by the mere evocation of the enchanted vocabulary of the reformer and the modernizer, but anyone who dared speak up against such measures must necessarily be a reactionary and an enemy of progress, a twenty-first century version of some ancient king beating the waves in savage fury, or proudly and vainly ordering them to recede from before him.
Let us define “reform” and “modernization”:
The deliberate stigmatization and victimization, the calculated dehumanization of a small population of people with an extremely limited ability to influence political processes that comprehend them only as targets whose numbers are to be reduced; of people who have scarcely any way of even showing their faces before the politicians proudly boasting of closing borders, whether they do it out of conviction, or electoral calculation, or some combination of the two.
If the premise of the universality of human rights is that all who are human possess those rights inalienably and unconditionally, by sheer virtue of being human, then logically, to deny one’s fellow humans those rights requires one deny their humanity. Now, I am not arguing for a second that British politicians, or their counterparts in too many other countries, from Chile to Canada, Australia to Austria, would, if pressed, actually deny that asylum seekers are less members of the species Homo sapiens than they themselves are. Most of them would probably not assent to the proposition that, when it came to human rights, asylum seekers possess anything but the same rights as born and raised citizen-residents of their own countries. But our politicians do not deal with asylum seekers as human beings who exist as such prior to their encounter with them. They know them only as an administrative and legal category, “asylum seekers,” their faces, their livelihoods, all their rich becomings in the world, screened from them by bureaucratic barrier after barrier, their existence accessible only either as policy problem, to be solved by policy document, legislation, and police enforcement; or as media object, inflaming “divisions” that the politicians’ task is to dampen, come what may. Sometimes they are not even potential humans, but, as in UK political and media discourse over the last year, “small boats”, contemptible little objects to be pushed back into the sea. If needs be, send in the Royal Navy! It is not the cruel treatment of asylum seekers that is “shameful”, but the number of boats that the post-imperial state is unable to stop arriving. From this objectification to a band of patriot-hoodlums picking up their passports and crossing the Channel to smash up some boats, and — why not? — roughing up a few refugees too, the step is not so great.
All these proposals, then, all these claims that unless we secure our borders, reduce pull factors, all these proud declarations that something must be done and I will be the one to do it: they depend on the transmutation of actual human beings into less than human, at best conditionally human. Your rights are but what we allow you, and if at any point we reduce them, this is not some ministerial caprice, but the will of our dangerously divided people in their search no longer to be divided.
As Hannah Arendt once pointed out in regard to the millions of people left stateless in Central and Eastern Europe in the aftermath of World War One, in the chapter of the Origins of Totalitarianism entitled “The Decline of the Nation State and the End of the Rights of Man”, there can be no universal human rights when their recognition and enforcement depend on state authorities who protect only the rights of their own citizens, thus excluding stateless persons from this “right to have rights.” And in today’s United Kingdom, one of the world leaders in the charming and arbitrary practice known as “citizenship stripping”, even that is no guarantee of your rights.
Nobody who has ever dwelt for any length of time on the scraps that have reached us from the past will have escaped noticing that history is full of dismal ironies. The very same day a government led by a former human rights lawyer decided to initiate an international effort to reduce certain people’s human rights and thereby push them to the margins of humanity, a solicitor [lawyer] acting for groups challenging the UK government’s remodeling of a military barracks in south-eastern England to house asylum seekers informed The Guardian that they were challenging the government by appealing to Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights! And so a local anti-asylum seeker group known as the Pink Ladies demands universal human rights, while the vulnerable stranger among them is to be hounded, certainly not housed, and preferably expelled. Devotees of 1970s kitsch will recall that the Pink Ladies are a group of high school girls in the movies Grease and Grease II, notorious expressions of a longing for a clean-cut, youthful, vibrant, but drug and violence-free 1950s USA — and above all, white — that surfaced at that time.
What do I feel, then? “Hatred, mostly.” What do I ask you to feel (if you do not already)? “Hatred, mostly.” This is a provisional and ultimately unsatisfying answer. We shall not hate! And yet you can see why it is worth exploring, can’t you?
— -You compare your disgust — warranted, no doubt — at the progressive dehumanization of asylum seekers with the Holocaust, an act of genocide without parallel, by definition incomparable, and you even dare to cite the words put into the mouth of someone who had lived through that catastrophe by a writer who had himself suffered it.
— -There is no doubt that the Holocaust was sui generis; so too was the Atlantic slave trade, so too the destruction of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas, so too the Armenian genocide. To say so is not to establish some potential scale of commensurability (“this genocide was worse than that by a factor of n”), nor to deny the grimly unique features of each one. Yet Rafael Lemkin, the polyglot Jewish jurist who coined the word “genocide” and gave shape to it as a crime in law, who fled Poland as the Germans advanced, arrived at the conceptual underpinnings of this idea before the Holocaust, his reflections triggered by the Armenian genocide. There are always limits to analogy, but human expression through language without analogy is impossible. Something must always be, to some extent, like something else, or else it is meaningless.
— -A less philosophical response. I hate the Nazis! I do not remember a time when I did not hate them. Like any British person, I was acutely conscious of the Second World War growing up, in my school history lessons well drilled in the basics of the Nazis’ rise to power. Ever since, as a scholar, and an avid and insatiable reader, even if the Nazis are not my field, I have never ceased to instruct myself about their deeds, and with each reading I hate them more. Them, and all those who, if neither enthusiastic party members nor even convinced antisemites, nonetheless went along with them because they preferred them to the alternatives, or thought they would at least serve some of their own ends, or solve some of Germany’s problems; yes, even some great thinkers whose works I have had to read but whose names I will not cite here. Yet I am far too young to have been a victim of the Holocaust, an Imre Kertesz; so too my parents, and nobody among the anterior generations in my family was a victim of the Holocaust either. A whole generation of grandparents and great-aunts and uncles contributed in various ways to the British war effort against the Nazis, though they almost never talked about it. Unlike the protagonist of Fatelessness, I cannot claim I hate the Nazis because of how I personally suffered at their hands — and yet I am certain you do not object to my statement, “I hate the Nazis”.
— -Yes, but we are not talking about a genocide of asylum seekers; not even pogroms, or massacres.
— — No doubt, but should we sleep the sounder for it? If one small boy is found face down in the sea, is that not already enough? What about the tens of thousands who have died in the Mediterranean? The English Channel? What about the thousand indignities suffered by asylum seekers, each one a living, breathing human being with a name and a story and a face, each day in Dunkirk and Lesvos, or outsourced to foreign governments less scrupulous about torture? The people detained illegally as prisoners by a private security company on a remote Indian Ocean island whose indigenous inhabitants had been ethnically cleansed six decades earlier to make way for a military base? The violent political regime constructed on Manus Island just to stop refugees ever making it to Australia? At what point is it legitimate to hate, if not now?
Hatred, mostly. You might know that in the Haggadah, the book of prayers and reflections drawn from rabbinic traditions that accompany the Seder at Pesach, there is a piece of commentary taken from the Mishnah: “In every generation a person must regard himself as though he personally had gone out of Egypt.” If we adjust the gendering, is this not the most laudable of principles? It starts from the observation that nobody at the table could possibly have experienced slavery under Pharaoh or exodus from Egypt, but that it is an obligation to imagine that one had; this is the very foundation of ethical action.
If it is well known that in antiquity a community emerged in the Eastern Mediterranean describing itself and being described as “Jewish” on the basis of a shared memory of the exodus from slavery in Egypt, nobody on earth today can possibly demonstrate a biological-genealogical connection to the Children of Israel, or even establish with any certainty the historical contours of those events. For that reason, we can sidestep the old debate about the particularity of Judaism as opposed to the universality of, say, Christianity; this ethical principle clearly emerged from Jewish tradition under Roman rule, and has been maintained as a living word within multiple Jewish traditions to this day, but its scope is just as clearly universal.
As an onlooker, then, not as someone who is targeted and who suffers directly; as someone with the rights and privileges of a citizen, with my little part to play in determining how and by whom we are ruled, I can feel hatred, but it must be hatred, mostly. As if this were happening to me, even if I must at no point fall foul of the illusion that I speak on anyone’s behalf but my own. I am not the voice of a voiceless other, but my own voice, and that voice can be raised up, not in hatred, but in empathy: in demanding a politics of empathy, of care for others, not just ourselves. In demanding a political movement that would join up all the admirable efforts that currently exist, housing refugees, representing them in court, lobbying politicians, attempting to alleviate the awful conditions of the camps, and magnify them a thousand fold, until the politicians are forced to come out from behind their screens of administrative ignorance, put down their piles of regulations and their speeches stuffed with cliches, and acknowledge that others, too, have faces; and tongues that speak, and limbs that move, and a reassuring warmth and scent when a loved one presses them close.
