Ever since the October 7 attacks on Israel, I’ve repeatedly threatened to go silent for a year, only to backslide a week or so later and sound off on something that somehow “demanded” comment. Having done this some eight times in a row, I decided to give myself until the end of 2023 to get any public comments out of my system, and then really stop. The reflex to keep talking was hard to kill, but I finally think I’ve succeeded. 

I happen to be writing this on the last day of 2023, so it’s my last day to avow the resolution in public and explain it. It seems absurd to explain a so-far failed resolution to go silent, but the situation itself is so surreal that the addition of yet one more absurdity on top of all the others seems like a drop in the bucket. In short: Why go silent now? Isn’t silence complicity in atrocity and injustice? 

Many defenders of the Palestinian cause think so, and with some plausibility. To be silent in the face of genocide, they say, is to make oneself complicit in it, to become a kind of willing accomplice to a world-historical crime. Only by speaking out can we hope to draw the world’s attention to Israel’s crimes and stop them. Stopping them is a moral imperative. So we must speak out. 

There is an important element of truth to this argument. I agree that Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza, that the United States is criminally complicit in this genocide, and that those of us who understand the issues are, in some fashion, morally obligated to speak out. I also agree that the mainstream Western media has done a pitiful, contemptible job of covering Gaza, and that Western countries have, with certain notable exceptions, done a contemptible job of responding to the facts. It’s the non-mainstream journalist-advocates who have actually covered Gaza with a view to getting the truth out, above all Gazans on the ground in Gaza itself, whose riveting, truth-guided reporting has invited, not Israeli rebuttals, but Israeli assassinations. And it’s their allies around the world on social media, many of them mere activists of the sort derided by academics and professional journalists, who have brought that message to a wider public. Without the activists, we would be at the mercy of liars, cowards, and psychopaths. Because of them, we’re not.

All of that is true, but none of it proves that silence in the face of what’s happening in Gaza is always and everywhere complicity in the crimes taking place there. Consider some exceptions to this rule, and you begin to see why. 

There is, first, the possibility of silence caused by honest confusion or ignorance. Some people may honestly be confused by what’s going on, or rationally ignorant as to the facts. Israeli propaganda consists of abject lies. The mainstream media has regurgitated these lies, and given them complex, byzantine rationalizations. It takes background knowledge and practice to see through propaganda of this variety, knowledge and practice that not everyone has, and not everyone sees the point of having. It’s plausible to think that that has given rise, as expected, to widespread confusion and rational ignorance, meaning ignorance produced by the rational decision to remain ignorant. Silence is perfectly appropriate, in fact desirable, in cases like this. Nothing of value is accomplished by having confused, ignorant people offer their cringeworthy “contributions” to public discourse when the stakes are as high as they are. We might wish that people were better informed or less confused, but we can’t blame them for being in the epistemic state they’re in. It’s not necessarily their fault.

It’s true that a pose at skepticism can serve as a veil for culpable incuriosity, callous indifference, or worse. Some Westerners may profess not to know what to believe because they secretly believe that Gazans deserve their fate. That’s blameworthy, but left at the level of passive, mute sentiment, it’s not the same as complicity in the crime itself. Complicity requires a positive contribution to crime, not mere passive acquiescence in it, however culpable. Both things may be blameworthy, but differently so, and the distinction is worth preserving and keeping in mind. 

Consider a different rationale for silence. Some people may be too fearful, even to the point of outright cowardice, to speak out. That, too, is blameworthy, but cowardice about confronting a crime, however immoral, is not the same as complicity in its enactment. Someone who, through cowardice, passively watches a robbery take place is certainly immoral, but not in the same way as the person appointed by the robbers to drive the getaway car or to function as a lookout. Again, the distinction is worth preserving and keeping in mind, despite the culpability of every party to the affair. All culpability is culpable, but not all culpability is the same.  

Beyond this, some fears may in fact be justified, and may genuinely imply that it would be best if the relevant persons kept silent. Some people may correctly be calculating that they will suffer (and do) more harm by speaking out than by keeping discreetly silent. There’s a tension between martyrdom and prudence, one that’s not always resolved by choosing martyrdom over prudence. Such people should be given the space to make their own decisions. Yes, some such calculations will be wrong, and some will conceal real cowardice, but on the whole, the choice between genuine prudence and mere cowardice is a judgment for the individuals themselves to make and live with. There is no earthly power that can legitimately serve as a universal conscience for all of humankind, and none that should try.

It’s worth noting that at this point, in “the West,” many things that one might want to say about Israel and Gaza are either straightforwardly illegal or otherwise punishable through banning from social media, or at-will termination from one’s employment, or some other means, or all of the above. In many states, the refusal to disavow boycotts of Israel entails the denial of state benefits (including reimbursement for services rendered) to which one would otherwise be entitled. Much that I currently want to say falls into at least one (actually more than one) of these categories. Full candor would at this point either get me arrested, and/or thrown off the Internet, and/or get me fired, and/or make me unemployable, and/or cut me off from benefits.

It’s not clear at present how to get around this set of obstacles, and not clear that crashing directly into them is the smartest thing to do. Personally, as someone ordinarily happy to crash into things, I see no great advantage to be derived from my being arrested, imprisoned, fired, banned, etc. simply to give public voice to views that are competently being defended by other people, but would end up wrecking my life, and make it impossible for me to make any long-term contribution to the cause. It would be one thing if there were no possibility of making any long-term contribution. In that case, martyrdom would be the only possible choice. But where the possibility of long-range action exists, there are other choices.

Yes, one can simply avoid saying illegal or otherwise punishable things, and confine oneself to repeating relatively uncontroversial ones, but there is no way of engaging sophisticated adversaries by observing such distinctions. Polemical adversaries ask pointed questions designed to draw you out, to expose the most controversial claims you want to make, and ideally, to put you out of commission through “self-incrimination.” One can’t engage adversaries in polemical confrontations of this sort by mentally resolving to confine oneself to one kind of utterance, keeping cryptically silent on others, and then trying to proceed with the argument. That’s like fighting with one hand tied behind one’s back. It won’t work. 

There is a further reason for falling silent, separate from all of the above. It is obvious to some of us that the Western public is simply not interested in hearing the straightforward, theoretically unadorned message that advocates of Palestine have so far been offering. So far, pro-Palestine activists, journalists, and academics have drawn attention to Israel’s history of atrocities against Palestinians, to the double standards involved in Israel’s accusations against the Palestinians, to the atrocities Israel has committed in the present war, and to the lies Israel has told to rationalize these atrocities. (Israel’s “war” is less a war in any ordinary sense of the term than a drawn-out string of terrorist atrocities masquerading as an anti-terrorist operation.)

This has had some effect on the intended audience, but only a limited one. A small minority of Westerners has been won over to the Palestinian side, but the majority are dogmatically committed to Israel’s version of the story. This is not, I think, because the Palestinian case is any sense defective, or has been badly made, or because the Israeli version of the story has very much going for it. On the contrary, I think the Palestinian case has justice on its side, and that the Israeli story is mendacious bullshit. The reason has to do with the defects of the audience, not the message. There is something deeply, pathologically wrong with Westerners–indeed, I think, with the very concept of “the West”– not with the Palestinian case. The question is what this is.  

There are, to be sure, answers out there. Some invoke the Israel lobby. Some invoke “racism.” Others invoke “Islamophobia,” and still others invoke “Orientalism” in the sense associated with Edward Said’s work. All of these explanations have their place, but none really does the job.

The ubiquity of the Israel lobby explains part of the problem, but we need an explanation for why it has the power it has, not simply an account of the fact that it has that power. Mearsheimer and Walt’s famous account of the Israel lobby addresses the latter issue, not the former.

Racism plays a role, but strikes me as too superficial an explanation to do the relevant work: both Israel and the US are multi-racial societies, and Palestinians are not racially distinctive enough to seem in any obvious way like a “race” of their own. So if racism is playing a role, this is multi-racial racism being wielded against a society whose members physically resemble many of the would-be racists. Any race-based account would have to deal with this rather convoluted complexity, but I’m not familiar with one that does.

“Islamophobia,” conceived of as an irrational, quasi-racialized animosity for Muslims as such, certainly plays a role, but it only goes so far. It doesn’t explain the widespread Western animosity for Palestinian Christians, and can’t justifiably be conceptualized (as it too often is) in such a way as to immunize Islam itself from rational criticism. In any case, the animosity for Palestine pre-dates the rise of political Islam, so that the invocation of Islamophobia as an explanation for that animosity involves a chronological mismatch. Western animosity for Palestine was there in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, when Islamism was not a significant part of the picture. Islamism is better understood as a religious response to pre-existing Western animosity than the source of the animosity itself. What we need is an explanation for Western animosity that’s been counterfactually stable against the waxing and waning of theo-political sentiment among Palestinians, not animosity that has taken actually-existing religiosity as a consistent target.

Said’s account of Orientalism is closer to the mark than any of these, but not, in my view, on the mark: as a mentor of mine put it, Said had a better case than he made. There are too many discrete methodological problems in Said’s account for the account to do the work needed of it. To pick just one: I’ve argued (see preceding link) that Said’s ill-conceived nominalism undermines what is otherwise an invaluable contribution. There are plenty of others.

We need, in short, to go back to the drawing board, to re-think things down to the fundamentals, to integrate what’s right in the preceding explanations, to reject what’s wrong, and to produce a comprehensive account that explains what needs explanation.

An inquiry like this requires defenders of the Palestinian cause to establish a division of labor. Some defenders of the cause should continue to monitor events on a daily basis, and speak out on a daily basis. But others should go silent and ask themselves a different, more fundamental question. They should ask themselves why Western audiences and above all Western governments are so unsympathetic to the Palestinian cause. Put philosophically, they should give themselves the task of producing a Nietzschean or Foucaultian or MacIntyrean genealogy of the Western desire for the destruction of Palestine. Why are Zionists and their sympathizers so adamant that Israel must live at Palestine’s expense? Why do they demand with such zealous righteousness that Palestine must die so that Israel can live? Bluffing aside, what is the basis of this aggressive sense of moral righteousness? What are its axioms, what are its theorems, and what is its foundation? How is it that Israel’s defenders have come to think that justice demands that we sign on to their project of civilizational erasure? By what means did outright genocide become so uncontroversial within a civilization that prides itself on its moral superiority to everyone else? 

Questions like this cannot be answered by constant immersion in the news of the day, or constant polemical engagement over it, or constant activism, or constant speaking out. They require sustained, long-term inquiry in undisturbed seclusion. That’s another way of saying, “They require silence.” 

So silence is not necessarily complicity. Sometimes, it’s the very reverse of complicity. It seems to me more important to leave space for the cases where silence is not complicity, than to police or call out the cases where it is. It’s more important to honor the conditions of truth-seeking inquiry than it is to punish cases of free-riding cowardice. So it seems to me, at any rate. And as someone answerable to no one but myself, that’s how I intend to proceed, hopefully with greater success than I’ve so far managed.

So, to paraphrase Depeche Mode, “Enjoy the silence.” See you in a year.