If you support Israel in the middle of a genocide, you’re an awful person

During the worst attack on Gaza before this one, in 2014, Steven Salaita, a Palestinian professor of American Indian Studies, had a tenured offer withdrawn by the University of Illinois over some strongly worded tweets he posted concerning that attack. Soon after, I published a piece in the New York Times blog The Stone (also see here), concerning one of those tweets – it said “Let’s cut to the chase: If you’re defending #Israel right now you’re an awful human being”(11:46 PM – 8 Jul 2014). 

I wasn’t addressing the obvious violation of academic freedom represented by his case, nor the appropriateness of his moral outrage at Israel’s actions – regarding those issues I was totally with him. Instead, I considered whether I thought the claim in the tweet was, in fact, true. Were defenders of Israel during this attack indeed “awful human beings”?

Let’s set aside the obvious hyperbole of the statement and the fact that, of course, most people, no matter their deplorable views, cannot be simply summed up as “awful”; human character is a complicated affair. What I take to be the point of the claim, however, is that if someone, after the horrific punishment meted out by Israel on Gaza, could still defend Israel, then this manifested a serious moral character flaw.

Without completely rehearsing my answer to the question ten years ago, briefly, it went like this. It’s important to distinguish between the moral status of an action and the moral character of a person. As applied to the 2014 Israeli attack, I argued that though Israel’s actions were indeed morally atrocious, people of decent character could still defend it given the surrounding social and informational environment in which they lived. Given the nature of Western (especially American) media, the standard assumptions of people’s families and friends, etc., it’s quite understandable how good, decent people might be misled into defending what are, in fact, morally abominable actions. I then interpreted Salaita’s tweet as both aspirational and interventionist. I saw it as aspirational in the sense that it pointed to a world where people were sufficiently well-informed by the media and their surrounding social environment so that, in fact, only “an awful human being” would support Israel’s actions. (The way I put it then was that the tweet wasn’t true, “but it ought to be”). It was interventionist in the sense that he was helping us to get to that world by modeling the reaction one ought to have.

As I’ve watched Israel’s genocide unfold these past nine months and seen so many political and media figures either outright defend Israel or produce so-called “nuanced” criticisms laced with excuses, I’ve had many occasions to think about Salaita’s tweet. Given the scale of the current genocidal attack on Gaza, and the abundance of information available from social media (and even the mainstream media, though usually one has to ignore the framing), is it now true that only “an awful human being” would defend Israel? This time, I think the case for answering in the affirmative is quite strong.

One might ask at this point whether the question really matters. As I am not a fan of “clean hands” politics, I don’t think one’s judgments of moral character normally have clear consequences about how one should behave politically. If the political calculation warrants it, I will “hold my nose”, or get my “hands dirty” when required. For example, though I indeed judge Joe Biden to be “an awful human being”, I will vote for him to keep a much more awful and much more dangerous human being from winning the election.

However, I do think this question of moral character matters a lot in two arenas: what I’ll call “deliberation in the public sphere” and local interpersonal relations. By the first, I have in mind the many controversies we’re now seeing in a large variety of settings over how to speak about Israel and Gaza. Organizations of every sort — whether it be government bodies like city councils and school boards, or non-governmental organizations like schools, universities, sports associations, online communities, private businesses, etc. — are dealing with questions about making public statements in the name of the organization on Gaza and disciplining the kind of speech concerning Gaza that takes place within the organizational spaces (e.g. see this story). I mention this arena mainly to set it aside here (but see this excellent discussion of the issue — and in the spirit of full disclosure, the author is my daughter). The only point I want to make here regarding the controversies taking place in these public spaces over how to address Gaza is that this question of moral character is playing an important role, if only implicitly. One might think of it this way: where is the line between the demands of minimal decency (not being an “awful human being”) and demands that are clearly political? The case of Gaza 2023-24 is bringing this question to the fore in unprecedented ways.

But it’s in the second arena, the realm of local interpersonal relations, where I have experienced the effects of the Salaita claim most deeply. Until recently I have been able to separate my political commitment to Palestinian liberation from my personal relations. There are many people, a number of them friends, who I knew felt quite differently from me about Israel/Palestine, and yet toward whom I had warm and friendly feelings. But now that’s changed — not completely, but in important, and quite discernible ways. There are now many people whose company I can no longer unequivocally enjoy, or, in some cases, even tolerate.

In particular, I feel very differently about certain Jewish friends, colleagues, and acquaintances. I’m thinking of people who actively affirm their Jewish identity as an important part of their lives, especially those who see Zionism, or some special connection to Israel, as an important component in their sense of their Jewishness. As I said above, in the past, I could look past this difference in our views, but now, after Gaza 2023-24, I can’t any longer. I find that all of my interactions with these folks are emotionally colored in a way that prevents me from experiencing the kind of warm fellow-feeling I used to feel in their company. I include here not only people “defending Israel” straightforwardly (actually, I pretty much don’t associate with people who do that), but primarily those who, with much liberal hand-wringing and consternation, express their sorrow over the loss of Palestinian life but then pivot to discussing the horrors of October 7, the difficulty of dealing with terrorism, Israeli-Jewish feelings of insecurity, and then, what really gets me going, the worrisome increase in antisemitism.

Read also: On Zionist feelings

I have recently spoken and written about the groundless charge that the protest movement is infected with antisemitism, charges that are taken for granted in many spaces (the political and media establishment, for starters, but also most prominent Jewish organizations — Jewish Voice for Peace and If Not Now being the notable exceptions). My writing and speaking about this has been mostly defensive, in the sense that I rebut the arguments that claim to show how antisemitic the movement is, especially those that conflate anti-Zionism with antisemitism. While I think publicly rebutting these arguments is necessary — and I’m sure, unfortunately, there will still be a need to do this often in the future — the politically expedient, perhaps necessary, adoption of this defensive mode has left me feeling frustrated and inadequate.

Here, then, is what I want to say to these Jewish friends and acquaintances who fret about antisemitism, especially those who perceive attacks on Israel as attacks on their identity. One way of thinking about Jewish identity is to think of one’s relation to the rest of the Jewish people as a kind of family relation. A people is sort of like a very, very large family. Israel, the Jewish state, can then be thought of as the family project. I think this is how many Jews do feel about Israel, and it helps to explain their taking criticism of Israel personally. However, while solidarity with, and concern for, one’s family members is certainly a crucial part of identifying with the family, so is taking responsibility for what one’s family members do. If my children, say, were to engage in morally atrocious behavior, my greatest concern wouldn’t be how people reacted to me and my family. My primary concern would be to rectify the wrong done, to the extent possible. So, in that vein, I ask, is the very moment the Jewish “family project” is engaging in genocide the morally appropriate time to worry about negative feelings expressed about Jews? Wouldn’t a “mensch” devote all of their energy to putting a stop to the family’s criminal behavior first, allying with everyone fighting for that goal (as we see JVP and If Not Now doing), and put aside one’s concerns about how some chants are phrased and some tropes are expressed? (See this for a particularly good example of what I’m talking about.)

In the spirit of the Salaita tweet, then, I will end with this. Anyone who is fretting about antisemitism, about the fears and insecurities of Jewish students on campuses, and all the other complaints about antisemitic tropes that are sometimes carelessly expressed by those reacting to the horror of Gaza — to them I say, “let’s cut to the chase; if this is what’s occupying your concerns right now, in the midst of a genocide being perpetrated by your own people, you’re an awful human being!”