Gaza, Israel, and Free Speech

As seemed inevitable, the Israel-Hamas war has spilled over into the United States, although in this country the battles have largely been fought with rhetoric.  Not entirely, however, as a six-year-old Palestinian American boy was stabbed to death and his mother critically injured in Illinois and three Palestinian students were shot in Vermont, leaving one paralyzed from the chest down.  There have been attacks on supporters of Israel as well, but mercifully none have been killed…yet.

While physical violence is not the norm, shrill verbal assaults from both sides have been unremitting and attempts at intimidation rampant, with neither, as is often the case in present day America, giving a hoot about what the other is saying.  Instead, insisting their opponents are either antisemitic or Islamophobic, each group has accused the other of variety of sins.

Those who are pro-Palestinian have charged that Israel’s long history of repression and the slow carving up of Palestinian land has been sloughed over, as has the horrific toll this brief but inhumane war has taken on innocent civilians, tens of thousands of whom have lost their homes, their livelihoods, and, in many cases, their lives.  The more radical critics have insisted that Israel is a made-up nation, imposed on territory that was not its own by other countries that were complicit in stealing Palestine from the Palestinians.

Those favoring Israel cite the incredible barbarism of the Hamas attack in which “fighters” murdered, raped, tortured, and burned alive men, women, and children, dragging off hundreds of hostages, from infants to octogenarians.  No other country in history, they argue—certainly not ours—would not have responded to such an unspeakable level of brutality with the same ferocity as has Israel, except that Israel made at least some attempt to allow civilians to flee before the onslaught began.  While some ridiculed the dropping of leaflets as largely self-serving and ineffectual, that was more than the United States did at Tokyo or Hiroshima.

Here again, each side has a point, but most reasonable dialogue has been buried in wave upon wave of vitriol.  And so, the focus has turned to speech itself.

Many advocates critical of the Israeli response, especially in the arts and academia, have been attacked, vilified, and sometimes fired for either a failure to sufficiently condemn Hamas or for focusing too much on civilians in Gaza.  This has created an opening for American conservatives, who have gleefully leapt on the issue as another example of “woke” tyranny, thus allowing them to renew their attacks on the left as opponents of free speech…carefully avoiding a discussion of all the books they themselves are trying to get banned from school curricula and libraries.

Israel’s supporters, including many elected officials, have been constantly badgered, sometimes accosted outside their homes or in restaurants, and accused—loudly—of complicity in genocide. This, in turn, has resulted in anyone who has criticized the Israelis or even called for a cease fire to be labelled an antisemite, with scant attempts to differentiate between the actions of the Israeli government and Jews in general.

This battle over free speech has been particularly hard on liberal American Jews—of which I am one—who have a deep and proud legacy of supporting Constitutionally guaranteed freedoms and the rights of the marginalized and oppressed.  The only white lawyer for the plaintiffs in Brown v. Board of Education was Jack Greenberg and two of the three civil rights workers murdered in Mississippi were Jewish.  In addition to fighting for racial equality, Jews were on the front lines of the labor union movement, the Vietnam anti-war movement, and the women’s movement. 

Nonetheless, the current resurgence of antisemitism, more visible than in decades, has given them pause, leaving them torn between what is ordinarily a moral commitment to protecting the right of an individual to say what is on his or her mind and the need to condemn—or prevent—the sort of incendiary rhetoric that could prompt a genuine antisemite, like the white nationalist who shot up the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, from moving past words and into deadly action.

But their choice should not be so agonizing.   Allowing all but the vilest and most extreme hate speech is not only morally correct but good strategy as well. (There are exceptions, obviously, which include direct threats, calumny aimed at a specific person, or speech that poses an immediate peril to the public, shouting “fire” in a crowded theater.)

There are two reasons.  The first is that repressing hate speech is impossible.  If the speech goes away, it doesn’t take the ideas with it, but merely forces them underground where they can and will continue to spread.  Even worse, they will likely grow even stronger, since those perpetrating these ideas have monopoly access to their audience. Therefore, suppressing offensive speech or requiring some formulaic response to the current crisis as a means to prevent the dissemination of antisemitism and the conversion of speech to action is at best a waste of time.  Social media has far too long a reach to hope that sanitizing public pronouncements will have any impact on either recruitment or incitement.

Second, allowing bigots, even those with PhDs, to spew their hatred publicly serves to let you know who they are.  Far better to be able to identify your enemies than to allow them to lurk in the shadows, camouflaged by platitudes.  An enemy in the open is a good deal easier to fight effectively. Although that is no guarantee of victory, it does improve the odds.

If we can’t stop hate speech, maybe the best move is let it air out and trust what Oliver Wendell Holmes, who also coined the “fire” analogy, called the “marketplace of ideas,” put forth in his famous 1919 dissent in Abrams v. United States, in which he protested the convictions of antiwar protestors under the Espionage Act.  “The ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas,” he wrote.

A fine example of the wisdom of that approach occurred in September 2007, when Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was invited by Columbia University to speak at the School of International and Public Affairs’ annual World Leaders Forum.  Jews were incensed.  Ahmadinejad, so boorish as to be almost a caricature, had often insisted Israel should be “wiped off the map” and that the Holocaust was a myth.  Many Christians were equally appalled.  Giving Ahmadinejad such an opportunity to spread his antisemitism while sanitizing Iran’s woeful human rights record was dangerous, wrong-headed, and offensive.

But Columbia refused to back down. The university’s president, Lee Bollinger, even chose to moderate the talk himself.

Ahmadinejad surprised many in the audience with his demeanor.  Aware of this unique opportunity, he did his best to be reasonable and disarming, even admitting that the Holocaust had occurred. For a time, it appeared that those who feared giving him a platform from which to falsify his and his country’s image had been correct.

Then, however, during the Q&A, Ahmadinejad was asked by a student to comment on his regime’s record of executing homosexuals.  With total sincerity, Ahmadinejad replied, “In Iran, we don’t have homosexuals, like in your country...In Iran, we do not have this phenomenon. I don’t know who’s told you that we have this.”

The audience’s reaction was immediate and unmistakable. They laughed! The more Ahmadinejad tried to justify his answer, the more the audience guffawed. And that laughter did more to expose the absurdity of Ahmadinejad’s defense of Iran’s domestic policies than any number of position papers from the State Department or even graphic footage on cable news.

Not every encounter will yield such an agreeable result, of course, but more demagogues have been sunk by their own words than by the accusations of others.

Again, this is not to suggest that anything can be said by anybody in any forum, but it is worth considering whether shining a light on hate speech might make it easier to fight than encouraging it to fester in the dark.