Cancel Culture Comes for Israel-Palestine

Yesterday's free speech warriors are today's enthusiastic censors.

Photo by Jorge Fernández Salas on Unsplash

As the hideous war in Palestine rages on, I’m finding it difficult to think, let alone write, about much else. The human toll is staggering, as thousands of people, many of them children and innocent adults who simply had the bad luck to be born in the wrong place at the wrong time, have been killed or injured in Gaza and the West Bank. Hundreds of Israeli hostages, who are innocent civilians including children, are still being held captive by Hamas, and more than 1,400 innocent Israeli civilians were murdered. Misinformation is rife, and it’s hard to know who and which claims to trust. Around the world, Jews fear for their safety; many are grieving loved ones who were slaughtered by terrorists in ways that defy basic humanity, that are nearly unimaginable in their cruelty and unvarnished evil. Around the world, members of Palestinian diaspora fear for their families and friends, and are grieving loved ones who were killed in their homes, or while taking shelter in a place they believed to be safe, who are being collectively punished for the actions of others, and whose lives are so often treated as expendable. Old wounds are being reopened, and this war is making plenty of fresh ones.

What’s happening in the United States in reaction — a handful of leftist groups making morally repugnant statements, conservative groups targeting them; pro-Palestinian voices being pushed out of the mainstream, stripped out of the discussion, or targeted for harassment; many Jewish students feeling alienated, targeted, and isolated on campus — is a paper cut compared to what the people living through this conflict are experiencing.

I’m writing about the US dynamic anyway, because the US is my current patch, and frankly because I don’t think my voice is a particularly useful one when it comes to the atrocities and complexities of this war and the many decades (and many centuries) of historical context necessary to fully understand it. All of us see the world from where we sit. Some of the work of being human is to move our seat around, to shift our vantage point and broaden our lens. Some of the work is to expand our moral imaginations, to try to see through someone else’s eyes. And sometimes, the work is to see and speak from our place that we know well. Today, I’m writing from where I’m sitting.

And from where I’m sitting, I’m seeing a mass abdication of the values so many of us — liberal and conservative alike — profess to hold.

In the US, pro-Palestinian lawyers, organizations, and activists are being pushed out of the frame. Their conferences are being shut down. Their comments are being stripped out of television broadcasts. Writers, including Jewish writers, are having their book events canceled if they are deemed too sympathetic to the Palestinian experience.

US employers are rescinding job offers to students who were affiliated with student groups that signed letters expressing support for Palestinians. For the record, I find some of these letters appalling. Several of them claimed that Israel bore “full responsibility” for the deadly attacks on Israeli civilians, which doesn’t so much provide a broader context as it wholly lets off the hook the Hamas terrorists who actually carried out more than 1,400 murders of innocents. These are not letters I would have signed, and I question the judgment, the politics, and the moral compass of the individuals who signed them. But also: We’ve seen this film before, and simply being affiliated with groups that are affiliated with other groups that have bad ideas should not be grounds for sanction. Job offers are being pulled from students who didn’t sign the letters themselves, and whose only wrong was being a member of a college club with leadership that decided to add its name. I don’t know when you were last in college, but as a student, I was a member of a half-dozen different clubs, and only regularly attended meetings for two of them. Other than the two I was actually dedicated to, my interaction with the others was fairly minimal, and I would have had no idea what their leadership was deciding to put its name on. I imagine the same is true now: That many of the student members of the clubs that signed onto these letters had no idea that it was happening.

And even the students who did knowingly sign these letters are not fair targets for threats and harassment. But that’s what they’re receiving.

More troubling still are the McCarthyite tactics being used by some right-wing groups to dox and publicly shame college students. Conservative groups have published lists of names of students who are members of the student clubs that are letter signatories; one group drove a truck around Harvard with a sign claiming to be outing “Harvard’s Leading Antisemites” and flashing students’ names and photos. These same right-wing organizations are demanding that the students they say are pro-Hamas be not only put on employment blacklists, but explicitly punished by their universities.

Whatever you think of the ongoing conflict or these student letters — and as I said, I personally think many of them are wholly appalling — the demands that universities sanction the students who signed them, and that employers blacklist anyone even loosely affiliated with the groups that signed them, should offend and alarm you.