I signed this open letter (“Philosophy for Palestine”) of philosophers, and would like to encourage my colleagues to sign it.
It calls for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, and for Palestinian freedom and equality. I’ve put a screenshot of the text here, but I think the central claim is made in this paragraph near the end:
“Right now, the people of Gaza have urged allies worldwide to exert pressure on their governments to demand an immediate ceasefire. But this should—this must—be the beginning and not the end of collective action for liberation. If there is to be justice and peace, the siege of Gaza must end, the blockade must end and the occupation must end. Above all, the rights all people currently living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean, as well as those of Palestinian refugees in exile must be respected.”
I also want to pro-actively address two aspects of the letter that I expect some people will object to: what it says, or doesn’t say, about the 10/7 attacks, and its call for an academic boycott of Israeli universities.
What About 10/7?
As is apparently the norm now, the “Philosophy for Palestine”s open” letter was attacked by another open letter, by philosopher Seyla Benhabib, and a central accusation was that it “elevates Hamas’s atrocities of October 7, 2023 to an act of legitimate resistance against an occupying force”, and “endorse[s] Hamas’s position as the supposed vanguard of the Palestinian ‘liberation struggle.'”
So the first thing to say is: it doesn’t! Like, it really does not by any stretch of the imagination say either of those things. Muhammad Ali Khalidi elaborates on this, to the extent of calling Benhabib’s response a “smear”; for my part I’ll just say that I was very very confused. I read the letter carefully before signing it, and would not have signed something making the alleged claims.
As far as I know, Benhabib hasn’t made any public clarification, but others have stepped in to fill the void, and explain why the original letter is unacceptably pro-Hamas. My first experience of this was rather farcical: I asked where in the letter it said the things Benhabib describes, and had someone triumphantly post a screenshot of highlighted text from… a different letter, issued 3 weeks earlier by different people. I wasn’t much impressed by that. But people have offered criticisms that do at least engage with the actual text, and may reflect something of Benhabib’s intentions.
Some lines of criticism focus on things that the letter does say, such as the line that “to act as though the history of violence began with Hamas’s attacks on October 7, 2023 is to display a reckless indifference to history as well as to both Palestinian and Israeli lives”, or the line that calls Israel the “oppressor” in this situation.
The unavoidable implication of this language, I was told, was to suggest to readers that whatever Hamas did was justified. Even though the letter’s direct text describes the attacks as “unacceptable”, and makes clear that the relevance of historical context is causal-explanatory: “In order for violence to stop, the conditions that produce violence must stop.”
So that’s one line of criticism: that by directing attention to the background context and condemning the conditions that led to 10/7, one is in effect justifying it. Ok, hold onto that thought for a moment.
A different line of criticism focused on what the letter doesn’t say: it condemns 10/7 but only in a “rather tepid” way, and fails to “look directly at the atrocity and say, ‘this is absolutely horrific and inexcusable’ full stop”. Here the suggestion is that the letter should devote more space to a more full-throated condemnation.
For what it’s worth, the attack was an atrocity, and absolutely horrific and inexcusable. I don’t have a problem saying that, and perhaps it would have been better for the letter to do so. But I don’t think the letter is obligated to do so. It’s not a letter about 10/7, and it wasn’t put out in response to 10/7. It’s a letter about the assault on Gaza, written after 3 weeks of that assault, calling for an end to it. So why, we might ask, does it have to make sure that its condemnation of this other event meets some standard of sufficient fervour?
The implied answer, I take it, is that the 10/7 attack is an essential part of the context for the assault on Gaza: you cannot understand that destruction without attending to it, and the fact that it was horrific and inexcusable, is essential to evaluating the overall situation here. By failing to unequivocally condemn that essential piece of background, one is in effect justifying it.
But now note the opposition between these two lines of criticism. Suppose the first is right: the mere act of referring to an event’s background context, and criticising the previous atrocities that causally contributed to it, effectively condones it. Then it would follow that condemning 10/7 at all in a letter about the assault on Gaza is already conveying that the assault is justified. Or suppose the second is right: the failure to refer to an event’s background context, and criticise the previous atrocities that causally contributed to it, effectively condones those atrocities. Then it would follow that any response to 10/7 that fails to sufficiently condemn the Israeli occupation is implicitly justifying it. The upshot is that, for a long-standing conflict with atrocities in multiple directions, anything possible statement about anything can be accused of implicitly justifying atrocities.
To put it another way: if the ethical way to speak about an atrocity is to ‘look directly at it’, condemn it ‘full stop’, and not muddy the waters by wheeling in past atrocities by ‘the other side’… then the Philosophy for Palestine letter shouldn’t have mentioned 10/7 at all. On the other hand, if the ethical way to speak about an atrocity is to note and recognise the relevant background context, then the letter should mention, and condemn, a lot of things, including 10/7 and settler violence in 2023 and the mass-disablings during the Great March of Return and the economic blockade of Gaza and the launching of rockets into Israeli towns and the practice of administrative detention and many other things. The only feasible way to do that would be to speak in generalities about how ‘there is a lot of history and killing civilians is bad’, which is basically what the letter ends up doing.
For what it’s worth: I can feel the pull of both perspectives. Saying ‘X is an atrocity, but it’s a response to Y’ can serve to minimise the horror of X. And saying ‘X is an atrocity!’, without mentioning Y, can serve to minimise the horror of Y. Moreover, saying ‘X is an atrocity, but what we really have to focus on right now is not letting it lead to Y is response’ doesn’t sound great as a sincere condemnation of X. This is part of why I found it hard to choose the right words in the immediate aftermath of Hamas’ attack, and didn’t say much for a couple of weeks. I regret my silence, and I’m sorry to any friends who were hurt by it, but I’m still not sure what I would have said. I knew something horrific had happened, and that something equally horrific and far larger in scale was about to happen in response, and I don’t know what words could have done justice to the former without increasing the chances of the latter.
I don’t know if there really is a good way to speak about ongoing cycles of atrocious violence, without seeming to erase or condone. Perhaps such events can’t be spoken of in a good way. But I think the Philosophy for Palestine letter did a decent job at short notice. What critics of the letter seem to want is that a statement about ongoing Israeli violence must always contextualise it as a response to Palestinian violence… and then immediately stop adding any more context. Individual critics might not formulate that demand themselves: they might simply, as a group, be disposed to take offence at both a failure to add enough contex going back as far as 10/7, and by any attempt to contextualise further back than that. And I think that pair of dispositions constitutes a double standard that functionally elevates Israeli lives above Palestinian ones.
Why a Boycott?
The letter I signed contains a call to join the academic boycott of Israeli universities, and as of November I am doing so. To be clear, it is specifically about refusing engagement with Israeli universities as institutions, and says nothing about individual Israeli academics; it also leaves space for Israeli universities that actively refuse complicity with the occupation to be exempted, though as far as I know none are considered to have done so.
This is something I struggled with. I’ve been opposed to the occupation for years but wasn’t part of the academic boycott until November. Partly this is because I don’t, in general, like the idea of closing off academic interactions. But it’s also because I am sensitive to the accusation that it represents a double-standard. Even if one agrees that the treatment of Palestinians is awful – even if it constitutes apartheid and ethnic cleansing – is it the only regime in the world doing awful things? Why aren’t there boycotts for dozens of other countries? Why only Israel? The fear, or insinuation, is that the explanation is antisemitism: people are primed to attribute outsized malice or evil to Jews, because of some combination of antisemitic animus and antisemitic stereotyping.
So I want to be clear that this boycott is not about an absolute ranking of badness, but about the interaction of three factors: 1) the overt and egregious injustice of the occupation, 2) the susceptibility of the Israeli state to the sort of influence I can exert, and 3) the existence of a coordinated boycott campaign that I can contribute to.
That second point about susceptibility is key. China and Iran, for instance, are both reprehensible regimes happy to brutalize their own citizens en masse, but I don’t think an academic boycott, or more broadly any exercise of the kind of cultural or diplomatic pressure which I might cause to be exerted, could make any difference to their decision-making. They’re already adapted to an oppositional stance, sanctions, trade war, military posturing, etc. from major Western governments, and given that situation I think any further isolation of academia there would likely do more harm than good. I think the world, and progressive forces within these countries, would probably be better off with a de-escalation of tensions between these countries and the West, and I think there’s a decent chance that more engagement between universities there and the broader academic community can strengthen liberalising tendencies.
By contrast, Israel is culturally and diplomatically part of the Western orbit, and is often seen that way (by itself and others). It is currently proving virtually impossible to get major Western govenrments to directly criticise Israel, let alone stop sending them military aid, let alone threaten them with anything. Rather than dangerously escalating tensions, there is a remarkable absence of tension. I think that Israeli society benefits from this, financially and psychologically, and thus may be susceptible to pressure from this direction. If I can contribute to that pressure, I think I should.
Are there other countries engaged in massive, overt, decades-long, human rights abuses while also receiving near-unconditional support, funding, and engagement from the West? Arguably there are, like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE, and various other oil-rich monarchies with huge populations of indentured migrant workers. And it would be fantastic for people to put more cultural/diplomatic/economic pressure on these regimes. I think people who criticised FIFA for holding the world cup in Qatar were right to do so, and I’m sympathetic to the sporadic calls that occasionally surface for a boycott of Saudi Arabia over its devastating war in Yemen (among the many odious things about that regime). But (and here’s the third factor) boycotts only work when they’re coordinated, and ideally when they’re responsive to the agency of their intended beneficiaries. So if there was an organised movement for academic boycotts of countries like Saudi Arabia, and it had been consistently called for by representatives of the people exploited and oppressed there, I would join it. As far as I know, though, there isn’t.
This third factor does raise a further question: why is there a coordinated boycott movement in this case but not in others? Why, more broadly, does it seem like everyone and their sibling has an opinion about Israel-Palestine, even while humanitarian catastrophes affecting much larger populations go basically undiscussed? Why will people who couldn’t find Sudan, Congo, of Myanmar on a map, get into heartfelt arguments about this fairly small strip of land in the Eastern Mediterranean? Here the worry about antisemitism reappears: isn’t Israel receiving a disproportionate amount of attention?
I think there are a few good responses, but they don’t completely explain the disproportion. One is just that coordinated movements take time to build, and the situation of the Palestinians has been basically unchanged for more than 50 years. Compare with South Africa, where there was a coordinated movement to apply pressure, and… it worked! Apartheid fell. That was 30 years ago. Compare also with Congo: while there is an important constant throughout different periods of recent history (violent conflict exacerbated by Western demand for raw materials) but the actual situation, who holds power where and who is fighting who, has been incredibly fluid and unstable, reducing the scope for outside coordination around a particular ‘side’ or ‘cause’.
And partly I think Israel-Palestine gets a lot more attention just through a sort of natural feedback: the media reports on it because people are interested, people are interested because they have opinions, they have opinions because they’ve seen it reported on so much. People talk about it because it gets talked about.
But I’m not sure if these considerations provide the full explanation of why this issue gets so much more attention than lots of other issues. So my suspicion is that part of the explanation is that many Arab and Muslim governments in the region have seen it as a politically useful issue to rally around, criticise, even go to war over, even while many of them treat actual Palestinians as an inconvenience or a bargaining chip. And part of what explains that is, plausibly, antisemitism. More broadly, the issue is clearly one that is going to attract antisemites from across the political spectrum, some cynically supporting Palestine because it helps them paint Jews as global masters of evil, some cynically supporting Israel because it fits their apocalyptic Christian fantasies.
Perhaps in a counterfactual history without any of that background, this issue would only receive the kind of sporadic, half-hearted, public attention given to many other conflicts. But would that level of attention be better or more appropriate? If there is a disproportion here, it seems to me more like a lack of appropriate attention to other situations, rather than an excess of attention to Israel-Palestine. God knows that attention involves a lot of fucked-up stuff being projected onto it, and a lot of the worst factions finding abundant foreign cheerleaders, but fundamentally it still seems better for there to be global outcry than not. What is happening in Gaza warrants global outcry, in part because outcry can enable the building of coordinated pressure. Lots of other situations also warrant global outcry, but I can’t generate global outcry for them as an individual. What I can do is add to coordinated pressure campaigns that already exist, and if that has a chance of contributing to a more just outcome at some point in the future, or to a ceasefire that comes one day earlier, I think I should do so.
Majestic Equality 