The APA Board & the Gaza Petition
At the end of last month, a petition was launched to move the Board of Officers of the American Philosophical Association (APA) to issue a statement about Gaza that would, “Unequivocally condemn the ongoing atrocities and war crimes against Palestinians” and “Express solidarity with Palestinian scholars, intellectuals, and students who are enduring immense suffering under war crimes, siege, and mass starvation.”
You can read more about the petition itself here.
The APA Board stated that it would consider the petition at its next meeting. It has now done so, and today, the APA’s Board Chair, R. Lanier Anderson, and Executive Director, Amy Ferrer, issued a statement about the Board’s decision.
They said that the Board was “united in its dismay at the violence that has erupted in Israel/Palestine since October 7, 2023, at the resulting losses of life and freedom, and at the deteriorating humanitarian situation in Gaza.”
However, in light of the discussion at that meeting, the likelihood of the APA membership being “deeply divided” on the issue and the petition, and the APA’s policy on board statements, the Board “concluded that no board statement on the substance of the current war in Gaza or its effects would be appropriate.”
They add: “It is… right that our policies and practices defer to the membership at large, rather than the board, when it comes to taking positions on such issues. Should members of the APA wish to pursue a member-voted resolution related to the war in Gaza, we invite them to contact us for guidance on how to begin that process.”
Below is the full statement:
Several weeks ago, the APA board of officers was made aware of a petition calling on the board to make a statement about the ongoing war in Gaza; the petition was shortly thereafter publicized on Daily Nous.
Although the petition organizers have not directly contacted the board or APA staff, we (the chair of the board and executive director) made the decision to include the petition on the agenda of the board’s summer meeting last week. Additionally, a draft statement relating to Gaza was submitted to the board through the formal statement request process by two APA members who were not party to the petition. At its meeting, the board undertook a thorough, lengthy, and probing discussion of both the petition and the draft statement.
The board was united in its dismay at the violence that has erupted in Israel/Palestine since October 7, 2023, at the resulting losses of life and freedom, and at the deteriorating humanitarian situation in Gaza. In addition to these grave moral concerns, the complete disruption of educational activity in Gaza is deeply regrettable. But the board’s discussion exposed deep disagreements both about the petition itself and more generally about whether the APA ought to make statements relating to the current conflict, or what sort of statement would be consistent with our mission as an association.
The APA’s policy on board statements provides both that the board should speak for the association only on a limited set of issues (academic freedom, funding for the humanities, threats to philosophy departments, professional working conditions of philosophers), and that even about those issues, the board should not presume to speak for the association as a whole when it judges that the membership is likely to be deeply divided on the issue in question.
In light of that policy and the tenor of the discussion at the meeting, the board concluded that no board statement on the substance of the current war in Gaza or its effects would be appropriate.
In the past (and often in times of war), the APA has taken positions as an institution concerning politically controversial issues of the day. These positions have been established not by the board, but by the members of the association through the member-voted resolution process outlined in the APA bylaws.
The board of officers is selected through processes focused on the advancement of philosophy as a discipline and profession, with little or no attention to candidates’ views or expertise on issues of wider social concern. It is therefore right that our policies and practices defer to the membership at large, rather than the board, when it comes to taking positions on such issues. Should members of the APA wish to pursue a member-voted resolution related to the war in Gaza, we invite them to contact us for guidance on how to begin that process.
R. Lanier Anderson, Chair of the Board of Officers
Amy Ferrer, Executive Director
The statement is on the APA’s website.
The episode raises questions about the conditions under which it is appropriate for the the leadership of an academic organization to make public statements about current events and issues that seem to fall outside the organization’s official mission—and questions about how to interpret that mission. The mission statement and list of principal activities of the APA can be found here.
I think that individual philosophers should publish arguments in support of their positions on Gaza. I don’t think the APA should take an official position. I think that doing so would further erode public trust in us without giving anyone a reason to change their mind about Gaza.
Except these sort of things inevitably build pressure on the higher ups who are sending funding to Israel that society at large is against it. In fact, the APA alongside dozens of other academic and civil society organisations might even indicate intellectuals are opposed to the war. Surely that matters.
While that sounds intuitive, the evidence I’m aware of suggests that the exact *opposite* is true.
In the contemporary US, when scholarly institutions take partisan political stands, they fail to convince anyone and come to be seen as less trustworthy—even by people who agreed with the stand!
See this study from Nature Human Behavior (which I linked in the prior thread):
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-023-01537-5
I don’t think anyone is confused about whether or not intellectuals are broadly opposed to the war.
But what does that even mean “intellectuals are opposed to the war”? That is not an easy question! Most intellectuals and non intellectuals (what ever this means) are likely opposed to war in general but being opposed to this war, or any war in particular, is not generalizable. Are we opposed to the start of the war, the attack by Hamas? Are we opposed to Israel attempting to dismantle Hams and retrieve their citizens who are being held hostage? Are we opposed to the way the war is waged by the Israelis? Are we opposed to the way the war is waged by the Palestinians? Do we even know the ‘truth’ boy that is going on, and if not how can we even have an opinion?
It is not an easy question – it is certainly not black and white.
Do we expect organizations such as the APA to ‘be against the war’ in this case then they must surely be expected to be against all wars. Do we ask them to come out against the war in Ukraine? Or do we except them to condemn Russia? Do we expect them to be against the civil war in Yemen, the attacks on the Druze in Syria? Why this war in particular?
“Do we expect organizations such as the APA to ‘be against the war’ in this case then they must surely be expected to be against all wars.” Well, that, of course, doesn’t follow. Why would my opposition to a particular war obligate me to be opposed to all wars?
You stated that you do not think anyone is confused that intellectuals are broadly opposed to this war.
True it does not follow that they ‘must’ be against all wars, but your comment seemed to presume war is a negative as intellectuals (presumably due to competent reasoning skills or some other insight particular to intellectuals?) in your opinion are against this war. So if you do not think intellectuals are, broadly, against all wars then explain why they in your opinion are against this war?
“You stated that you do not think anyone is confused that intellectuals are broadly opposed to this war.”
No I didn’t. Are you replying to someone else? I simply pointed out that if one is opposed to a particular war, it doesn’t follow that they’re opposed to all wars (which is trivially true).
it’s not a war, it’s a genocide. there is a difference.
Absolutely. It is thoroughly unacceptable for an organization dedicated to the pursuit of truth and philosophical enquiry, whose practitioners have deeply thought through the nature and substance of morality, ethics, truth, and justice, should offer its opinion on an active genocide. Simply ridiculous even imagine it would do so (cue the mental reference to Aristotle on sarcasm in his Rhetoric…). SMH
How do you people even live with yourselves?
Setting apart the double standards and racism, that the APA sees the “advancement of philosophy” with no attention to views on “issues of wider social concern” tells you all you need to know about what they consider philosophy.
Yes, if only we lived in a world where the hundreds of thousands of professional associations around the world were constantly issuing statements on issues of wider social concern that go beyond their narrow professional remit. The flood of banal bureaucratese statements that would follow would surely make our world better, or at least, as you say, make it less racist!
Whatever you are trying to say here, it’s completely beside the point of my comment.
Referring to the Hamas regime’s massive invasion of Israel, the thousands of missiles launched, the massacres and kidnappings as “the violence that has erupted” is a wonderful bit of bureaucratic rhetoric.
As one of the signatories to the original petition, I wanted to condemn this response from APA leadership. I also wanted to bring up several facts that were really relevant to my motivations for signing that have seemed absent from the discussion on DailyNous (I make NO claim at all to these being relevant to others’ motivations).
You know, aside from it being the latest in academic jargon, I’ve never understood the interest in framing Israel as a settler colonial project. It’s an analytic framework designed for countries like the U.S., and I’m not frankly sure if the shoe fits. Then we lose focus on the horrors and start debating definitions.
Even if it doesn’t, Israel’s actions in Gaza would still be deplorable. So, I just don’t know why we insist on this approach. Like the slogans (“from the river to the sea”, etc.) usually it just ends up turning the conversation to something other than what matters. A complete tactical failure.
I’m always frustrated that those who support Palestinians choose the most controversial, alienating methods of promoting their cause. Especially when their opponents want to cast them as villians to begin with.
It’s really not accurate to think that this “analytic framework,” as you call it, is particularly new. Its roots are difficult to trace, but the earliest clear statement of it is probably Kenneth Good’s work in the ’70s (although I’m no expert). Many of the ideas, if not the lingo, go back farther, of course, to Fanon and others. The ideas received extended treatment and development, by both scholars and activists, throughout the ’80s and ’90s leading up to Patrick Wolfe’s work in the late 90s and early 2000s, which I think (again, not an expert) constitutes the basis for contemporary discussions.
This framework was developed in response to the situations in — and applied broadly to — Algeria, South Africa, (then) Rhodesia, Palestine, the US and Canada, Australia, and New Zealand (and the list goes on). Whatever you meant by “like the U.S.”, and whether you regard these different places as sufficiently “like” the U.S. along the relevant dimensions, it just is the case that this way of thinking has in fact been applied to areas across the world, including Israel, for decades. (See, for instance, the references provided in this paper.)
Whether one agrees with this framework, as it applies to this case, is, of course a separate matter. My point is not necessarily that it is correct. I only aim to challenge the assertions that (1) this entire framework is a recent development, and (2) its application to Israel is also quite recent. The framework itself goes back around 60 years, give or take, with applications to Palestine happening *very early on*, by Palestinian scholars themselves first before western scholars started following them in in the ’80s and ’90s.
Can you say why you aren’t sure if the shoe fits? My naive view is that settler colonialism is when you go some place and take it away from the people living there in order to form a new state. This was the explicit goal of some Zionists, and they succeeded in Israel, didn’t they?
Perhaps your view is that there’s a distinction between colonialism and colonization, such that the former is bad and the latter is neutral, and since Israel is pretty decent we shouldn’t use the former to describe it? (See e.g. this article.) I think this is casuistry but even granting the terminological distinction I would put Israel on the other side of the line. Even if you wouldn’t, surely you can see why people who would might use the word?
Or maybe the similar thought is that colonialism is a really bad word, and Israel’s not so bad? (See e.g. here.) Here I think again even if you agree with the article and disagree with me, you ought to be able to see where the opposing side is coming from.
Maybe you have other thoughts (for the “state of the art” summing up a lot of the back and forth see here). In general though I’ve never really seen a compelling case for staying away from the word “colonialism” in this context.
Counterexample to your definition: suppose the Cherokee somehow gained enough power to leave Oklahoma, take back Georgia, displace the current inhabitants, and set up their own state. My intuition is that that is not settler colonialism as we typically understand it. You might introduce an indigeneity condition to rule out the counterexample, but that’s where it obviously gets complicated when we try to apply the concept to this conflict given the cultural and ancestral ties that Jewish people, even Ashkenazim, have to the region. That’s literally the main cause of dispute over whether the shoe fits. You might alternatively bite the bullet and say the Cherokee would be settler colonialists, but that would be very surprising and certainly not a commitment that most who accuse Israel of settler colonialism would want to take on board. They would, to the contrary, frame it as decolonization.
Zionist, if you want to go down the route of ties to the land framing it as a return of Jews after gaining power, you’ll have to contend with numerous studies that show genetically the current Palestinians (Christian and Muslim) have a far better claim.
FWIW, I don’t think this is a very good argument for either side. You really just have to read Zionists themselves describe their project before the creation of Israel as a settler-colonial one. They even considered multiple possible places to do so!
Let me be clear: my Zionism isn’t tied to whether or not Israel is a settler colonialist project. In fact, I think Zionism would have been justified even if it was a settler colonialist project. I was just elaborating why it’s contentious whether it fits the definition. And Palestinians can also be indigenous. Indeed, I believe they are! That would just show that the conflict is better characterized as a conflict between an expelled indigenous group and an indigenous group who chose to assimilate to the colonizer’s culture. But that’s where still doesn’t fit the normal definition of settler colonialism.
In any case it’s clearly not a *white* settler colonialist project. To give one example, the current CoS of the “white settler colonialist” military is of Yemeni and Syrian descent
Yeah, Israel famously has never subjected Yemeni Jews or other non-white Jews to racism…
I’m quite well up on Israeli history, thanks anyway. My point was that a “white colonialist” interpretative frame doesn’t seem to make sense when about half the putative “white settlers” aren’t white and their parents and grandparents came from neighbhouring states.
How exactly do you define “white”?
they’ve been subjecting Yemenis in particular to racist exploitation since 1908. See Gerhson Shafir’s Land Labor and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.
Mourinho,
You should cite sources for your controvertial claim about genetics. In fact, the information I can find on the topic suggests that the jews have “strong genetic ties to non-Jewish groups, with the closest genetic neighbours on the European side being Italians, and on the Middle Eastern side the Druze, Bedouin and Palestinians” (https://www.nature.com/articles/news.2010.277). This is not the only study supporting this. This illustrates one reason why the APA should stay out of this – people do not even have the facts the right.
I’d be happy to label the Cherokee taking over Georgia as settler colonialism, perhaps one of the few justifiable cases of colonialism in (hypothetical) history. You say this would be “surprising,” but I am not afraid to surprise. That many would fail to take the commitment on board just shows that they are inconsistent in their thinking. They could remedy this by reading some of what I’ve published on the topic of colonialism, which I think helps make these things clearer!
Some links: https://scholarlypublishingcollective.org/uip/paq/article-abstract/38/3/239/392019/Colonialism-Is-Per-Se-Wrong-Only-If-Colonialism-Is?redirectedFrom=fulltext
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/16544951.2024.2411036
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13698230.2020.1838737
I’ll have to read your work, but, on the face of it, I don’t think they’re being inconsistent. They adopt a definition of settler colonialism that requires that the conqueror be non-indigenous and then deny that Jews are indigenous. This usually takes one of two forms. In western circles, they try to articulate a definition of indigeneity that excludes Jews but includes Palestinians. I have found that these attempts either have implausible consequences for other groups or entail that Jews are indigenous, but the former is not necessarily a form of inconsistency.
The other strategy, which is more common in the Arab world, though it is also growing more popular in western leftist circles, is just to deny that Jews have any ancestral connections to the region. For example, you’ll find that a surprisingly large number of Palestinians deny that there was ever a Jewish temple in Jerusalem. I think Arafat even suggested the temple was actually in Yemen during the 2000s peace talks. This strategy usually results in people adopting conspiracy theories about the origins of Ashkenazi Jews that are historically connected to white supremacy. So you’ll find people claiming that Ashkenazi Jews are pretenders, and that Mizrahi Jews are the real Jews, and that Ashkenazi Jews duped Mizrahi Jews into turning on their Arab brothers. This narrative is also a helpful coping mechanism. The Arab world was humiliated in 48 by being defeated by a group of people they historically treated as second class citizens and viewed as their inferiors. Distinguishing Ashkenazim from Mizrahim and blaming the loss on the Ashkenazi Jews’ secret control of Western society explained how that could have happened. It’s strikingly parallel to how white supremacists reconcile the diminishing global power of white people with their belief that they are superior to non-whites: they blame the cunning of the Ashkenazi Jews.
On another note, I think there’s nothing inherently wrong with going with your non-standard definition, but it’s a little misleading given how that term is normally understood today. And that fits into my broader concern about how, when people want to accuse Jews of heinous things, they start using familiar terms in non-standard ways. But it probably isn’t productive to have that conversation here.
Yes, sorry, I should have been more clear. The main inconsistency I had in mind was inconsistent application of the criteria for settler colonialism, but as you point out, there are other mistakes people can make instead. I think most of those amount to other kinds of inconsistencies (e.g. you point out that adopting certain standards of indigeneity “have implausible consequences for other groups,” and I think ignoring those consequences is another way of being inconsistent) but there are other ways of making mistakes too, like having weird ideas about Ashkenazi Jews etc.
“I’d be happy to label the Cherokee taking over Georgia as settler colonialism, perhaps one of the few justifiable cases of colonialism in (hypothetical) history.”
I’m a little embarrassed to have to point this out, but that would clearly be wrong. And you should feel bad about thinking it would be justifiable. (See: violence is wrong, the non-identity problem, and so on).
I said perhaps. In fact my considered view is that it’s almost certainly not justified, but this depends on the specifics, about which nobody can say anything because we’re not talking about a real case. But my point is that it’s at least open to us to say that settler colonialism is justified. Many people deny this – they think colonialism is per se wrong. But I think this is incorrect.
In any case I think you’re imagining very different things than I am. “Violence is wrong” has nothing to do with the hypothetical case unless the hypothetical Cherokee are hypothetically killing people, but obviously that would be no good. I was imagining a non-violent takeover. I also don’t really see what the non-identity problem has to do with anything here.
In this context, the decolonization framework should be taken to include, in addition to a theory of what settler colonialism is, a normative political philosophy. The central claim of this political philosophy is that the primary political task in settler colonial societies is to dismantle the settler colonial state/regime and return the land to the indigenous people. Another key tenet of the theory is that indigeneity is defined in blood-and-soil terms: if you’re a genetic ancestor of the first tribe to occupy a bit of land, then you’re indigenous to it and are amongst the people to whom it “belongs.” Similarly, a “settler” is anyone who lives in a colonial regime and whose bloodline traces back to someone who literally settled the land–or to a member of a “race” the members of which settled the land.
A relatively uncontroversial version of this view can be found in some of the early decolonial writing on states like Rhodesia and South Africa, where a small settler minority dominated and oppressed a large indigenous majority. Applying the same thinking to the US, Canada, Australia, and even Israel is obviously much more problematic. Destroying the South African apartheid state and returning political power to the indigenous majority only required establishing a democracy. How do you return the land and power to indigenous people in the US, Canada, or Australia? I understand that many people who use the rhetoric of decolonization in application to Israel are only calling for a kind of civic democracy that doesn’t favor a particular national or religious group. A few things to note about this:
– Unlike black South Africans, neither Jews nor Palestinians want such a state.
– The decolonization framework is unimportant for this advocacy; it could instead be based on more standard arguments for civic democracy.
– The decolonization gambit is anathema to the formation of a diverse, broad-based movement. It’s an ideology of reconquest, pitting one group (the colonized) against others (the colonizers and their accomplices). While all movements might need enemies, the decolonial framework identifies the wrong ones. In the US, Canada, and Australia, no movement can succeed without massive buy-in from the “colonizers,” i.e., white people. My view is that the Palestinians and their allies won’t defeat Israel militarily and that this means their only path to a better future goes through some kind of cooperation with Israeli Jews, as out of reach as this seems at the moment. But Israeli Jews won’t accept the destruction of their state. Moreover, returning to the US, if the goal is the destruction of the colonial state, then black Americans shouldn’t fight for more rights and representation under this state. To do so is to collaborate with the enemy.
Settler colonialism is bad, and its legacy still harms the descendants of its original victims. Addressing this state of affairs likely requires careful analysis of the nature of settler colonialism, and this analysis might usefully inform political action. We can acknowledge all of this without adopting the destruction of “settler colonial states” or return of the land to the indigenous as goals, and without a reactionary, blood-and-soil conception of territorial control. All the necessary resources are already available in the commonsense political morality of democracy, tolerance, liberty, equality, etc. So MNfG is right to say the decolonial rhetoric is an unnecessarily alienating way to express the important truths about Israel and Palestine.
This strikes me as extremely sensible, putting into words much of what I’ve long thought about this issue. For that reason, I’d love to hear a rebuttal from a smart philosopher who thinks there is more present, practical utility to the concept of ‘settler colonialism’ as applied to these issues. (I’m less interested, but not uninterested, in whether there are normative implications that are not likely to get much political uptake)
Thanks for the push to think more deeply about questions around tactics of movement building—like what the most helpful framings of the issues are.
For starters, I want to make it clear that I’m absolutely a pluralist about frames. So please absolutely talk about what is happening to Palestinians at the hands of Israel and the United States in terms of genocide. I would just also add that settler colonialism is a helpful frame through which to view the horrors and injustices Palestinian people are experiencing day-to-day.
I think this for quite a few reasons…
1. I think it’s misleading to say that what’s happened is “those who support Palestinians choose” to bring settler colonialism into the conversation. At least in my case, I’m following the lead of Palestinians making that choice. My first post already mentioned Nur Masalha and Edward Said, both Palestinian academics and activists who understood Israel to be a settler colonial project. What I take to be the most important historical work for understanding the current genocide against Palestinians, Rashid Khalidi’s “The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017” is written by a Palestinian centering settler colonialism. Palestinian activist, academic, and attorney Noura Erakat’s beautiful foreword for “A Land with a People: Palestinians and Jews Confront Zionism” is framed in terms of resilience in the face of settler colonialism. My justification for my own use of the phrase “from the river to the sea” is very similarly about centering Palestinian voices. When I use the phrase in protests, it’s part of a call and response started by Palestinian activists and comrades.
2. Not only is it that leading Palestinian voices on Palestine talk about settler colonialism. It’s also the case that leading voices on settler colonialism regularly apply it to Palestine. Tuck and Yang talk about Israel/Palestine in their famous “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor”. As do Mark Charles and Soong-Chan Rah in their “Unsettling Truths: The Ongoing, Dehumanizing Legacy of the Doctrine of Discovery”. As does Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz in her “Not a Nation of Immigrants: Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy, and a History of Erasure and Exclusion”. As does Daniel Heath Justice in “Why Indigenous Literatures Matter”. So, again, it seems not true that it’s an analytic framework designed for situations that somehow exclude the case of Israel/Palestine.
3. The analytic framework around settler colonialism has already proven to be a useful tool in creating solidarities across difference in efforts alongside Palestinian resistance and resilience. In addition to the aforementioned “A Land with a People: Palestinians and Jews Confront Zionism”, there is also “For Gaza’s Children: Progressive Black, Brown, and Jewish Writers and Poets Speak Out” where settler colonialism is a central analytic framework. There’s also Angela Davis’ “Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement”.
4. It seems like looking at Palestinian genocide through the lens of settler colonialism could also be helpful in growing the movement. In particular, “Progressives except Palestine” might be able to have their hearts and minds changed by seeing the connection to settler colonialism.
5. Many of the early Zionists and the founders of the state of Israel were clearly working within a settler colonial frame. The Basel Program unanimously adopted at the First Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897 had as goal number one, “The expedient promotion of the settlement of Jewish agriculturists, artisans, and businessmen in Palestine.” Originally written in German, this is also sometimes translated as promoting “the colonization of Palestine by Jewish agricultural and industrial workers” (see Mehran Kamrava). In either of these cases, it provides a clear statement of settler colonial intent. On top of that, as could be expected while working in conjunction with the settler colonial states of Great Britain and the United States, Israel’s settler colonialism is incontrovertibly an extension of the doctrine of discovery (again, See Charles & Rah). Just as we saw in Hobbes and Locke, there are terra nullius arguments. The first prime minister of Israel, David Ben-Gurion says about the founding of the state of Israel:
“I believed then as I do today that we had a clear title to this country. Not the right to take it away from others (there were no others) but the right and the duty to fill its emptiness, restore life to its barrenness, to recreate a modern version of our own nation. And I felt we owed this effort not only to ourselves but to the land as well.”
More directly, the fourth prime minister of Israel, Golda Meir: “There was no such thing as Palestinians…they did not exist.”
Can I ask why you only seem interest in centering Palestinian voices and not Israeli voices? I understad you have a distinct opinion on this conflict but we can all agrees that there are a plurality of opinions as to what is what and who did what and why in regards to any conflict? Why this one sidedness?
While appreciated, I find your arguments for using this frame unconvincing. Several are just the observation that people do use it (activists, other academics, etc.). And that the frame is useful for building solidarity is exactly what I deny.
The concept of settler colonialism is tied to the notion of Indigeneity, which is fraught in the Palestine / Israel case. Whose Indigenous to the region? (This speaks to Weltman and Zionist’s exchange). I’m not interested in settling the question and do not think it matters. The arguments I see online about who was where first seem thoroughly beside the point and unproductive. They also quickly veer in anti-semitism that makes activists look bad.
In other contexts, the theory of settler colonialism becomes a way of rehabilitating ethno-nationalism (e.g., dispossessing a people is fine as long as those who “originally” lived somewhere do it). Who was where first is, I stress, entirely beside the point. Even if the Palestinians were not Indigenous to the region, they are there now and killing them would not be okay. Curiously, a lot of laypeople notice this immediately and get confused by the settler colonial framing.
More to my original point, this frame alienates possible allies to the Palestinian cause in several ways. (a) It’s a relatively arcane and inaccessible to non-academics; (b) it rests on a contentious claim about Indigeneity that is entirely beside the point of whether Israel’s actions are wrong; (c) it distracts from the messaging that actually convinces the uninvolved, which more straightfowardly focuses on how killing innocent people is bad.
Zionism has been a quintessentially settler colonial enterprise for 150 years. You know how we know that? Because the movement described itself as such from the beginning. In Hebrew all the terminology – hityashvut, hitnachlut, yoshev, etc etc. – means literally settlements, colonies, the associations had the world “colonization” in them. the officials came from African colonial enterpirse (Ruppin Warburg, etc). This is simply stating facts; it’s literally a deductive argument to call it settler colonial. You can’t understand the horrors of Gaza without understanding the roots of that horror going back to the moment Zionist leaders sought to “conquer” (kibush) as much land as possible in order to conquer the labor market to support a large settler population. That happened in 1909, the year the first two exclusively Jewish spaces – Tel Aviv as an urban space and Degania as the first kibbutz – were established. This is established fact. I’m sorry, there’s no way to be debating this anymore than we can debate that the US or Canada or South Africa, etc were settler colonial projects that resulted in genocide. It’s the very nature of the process to produce this violence.
Clearly you can adopt your views for whatever reasons you choose, but without taking on any view on the rightness/wrongness of those 3 points, I think they are great examples of the types of consideration likely to be the least persuasive, and indeed positively counterproductive, in influencing anyone who doesn’t agree with you already.
Many people previously broadly supportive of Israel are strongly opposed to its conduct in this war because it is acting with great cruelty and causing terrible suffering and death. Disgust at this is widely felt; views on ‘settler colonialism’ are shibboleths of a certain segment of the academic and online classes.
Thanks for the engagement, Rollo.
Again, I’m a pluralist about important frames. Just as I agree genocide is an important frame through which we can view Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, I also agree that cruelty, suffering, and death are important frames through which we can view Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.
Again, I’m still trying to understand the claim that settler colonialism is a problematic frame through which to view the situation. Part of my confusion here comes from genuine surprise that folx see the analytic framework around settler colonialism as just coming from academics and online and tangential to the movement.
My surprise here comes from my own experience, though. So, I’d be curious to hear other’s experiences.
My own experience is connected to the fact that I’m only a part-time academic. My full-time work is in racial, environmental, and social justice spaces. My experience with these two spaces is that I have more conversations about settler colonialism with activists than I do with academics. And part of this consistent conversation around settler colonialism in activist and movement circles is connected to the need to create solidarities in communities that cross settler colonial borders (specifically the USA/Canada borders and the Mexico/USA borders).
Also, in case folx are interested in some examples of what I mean, I’ve included a little collage of some flyers for, and photos taken during, various political actions which greatly engaged the analytic framework around settler colonialism.
Again, I’m very genuinely interested to hear about folx who might have contrary experiences.
Thanks Matt. Unlike you I’m not in any sense an expert on these topics but my basic point is that while these colonialism-type arguments and points of view are doubtless energising to activists etc they are going to be much less likely to mobilise the broader public, and that is what is needed actually to influence the policy positions adopted by our governments.
In the UK where I live there is certainly a core of activists who lap up talk of settler colonialism: they are in many cases literally the same people who also protest about a constellation of other things (e.g. environmental causes). To a very good approximation, politicians don’t care what these people think – they are comfortably ignored by everyone. If the wider public have any view on them it is that they are a nuisance. All of the people persuadable by arguments about colonialism already strongly disapproved of everything to do with Israel and have done for years. I would be amazed if there is a single person previously supportive of Israel who ceased to be so because it they were told that Israel was a colonialist enterprise. There are however plenty of people previously supportive of Israel who are not supportive of its current actions because of their brutality, and because its current government is openly uninterested in any peaceful resolution.
Basically – starving children and blowing up hospitals will galvanise broad public opinion and this is noted by leaders. Activists talking on twitter (or wherever they do it nowadays) or marching down Park Lane shouting about settler colonialism will be ignored by everyone else.
Are we condemning what the State of Israel is doing, now, or the State of Israel, period?
I would have thought it was the former, but this last post makes it sounds like the latter. And I want to urge that, whatever its merits, this is a very bad idea. Very few states, including nearly all of thos neighboring Israel, and including the U.S., have a fully just origin story, or a non-colonialist one. And equally few states have a fully just system of government. But we don’t generlaly go around being “anti-“, say, America, period, or anti-Russia, or anti-Iraq or anti-Brazil (during Bolsonaro’s reign, say). We stick to particular policies.
And with good reason: being Israeli, like being Russian, Syrian, Iraqi, or what have you, is a matter of where and to whom one is born. The state, in other words, exists and is thus a whole society, community, and citizenry, almost 10 million people, who need have no particular stance on what sort of policy, or even what sort of constitution or governmental system, the country should have. Yet when you start to demonize the country as a whole, as a “creation” of this or that, or whatever, you in effect stigmatize all of them. It’s why people balk at suggestions to boycott scholars or artists from a particular country, regardless of their stance or connection to government. It’s even uglier when this sort of banning of “those people” is done only to citizens of one country, in particular, the one associated with the very same ethnic group typically subject to such exclusion.
Most distressingly, we’re seeing an uptick in violence against individuals now, simply in virtue of their identities as Israeli or Jewish. Talk of Israel being a this, or a that, contributes to that sort of violence, by in effect making a matter of one’s born identity a target of hate, a liability.
So please, be careful: say what you want about what Israel is doing — I might sign such a petition, in that case — but leave out this talk about what it is. It’s literally deadly. And at best pointless.
With all due respect, I don’t think it would be unjustified by, say, Iraqis to speak of America in broad strokes as being evil and rooted in evil. Nor would it be unjustified for people to denounce South Africa during apartheid, period, as a state (existing in that way).
Israel’s existence as Israel, that is, one rooted in Jewish-supremacy to the exclusion of the Christian and Muslim Arabs there, and its classification as an apartheid state, warrant such general states.
I’m a bit dismayed at talk of this resulting in violence. Random attacks on Jewish individuals is abhorrent, anywhere. But do you not think it is a bit lopsided when you compare the violence that comes from the very existence of Israel (60k+ dead in just 2 years, for example)? I really recommend this piece by Matthew Noah Smith on Jewish complicity: https://substack.com/home/post/p-158966694.
I really think talk of “Jewish complicity” is part of the problem. Nobody should have to be seen as complicit in anything because of what identity they were born with, and that includes, yes, “Israeli.”
And no state is “rooted in Jewish supremacy” or anything else. You mentioned South Africa, but it changed its system, rather than ceasing to exist. Israel could do the same, and proposals for already doing so have been around a long time.
Israel was founded for many, often clashing reasons, quite a few of which had nothing to do with “Jewish supremacy” and everything to do with establishing a place of refuge for Jews fleeing what was, at the time, very real persecution everywhere else. It was what Abba Eban called a case of “international affirmative action,” but all that meant was that Israel would be a “jewish state” in some sense, most importantly for refugee purposes, not that it would discriminate against non-Jewish citizens or prevent them from being citizens.
It was in no way essential to the idea of Israel in all its manifestations and adherents that it place Jews hierarchically above others. Indeed, criticism of current and past policies that ended up subordinating non-Jews — legitimate criticism, I should add — presuppose as much. It didn’t have to be this way, as some kind of essential outgrowth of the original plan for the state.
And now the state exists, with millions of people and a large military, and it will not voluntarily cease to exist. Attempts to bring that are, in other words, effectively a call for a violent Armageddon that will dwarf in death and destruction all the loss of life wrought by this conflict so far. Better to advocate for the policies you want changed.
This rather looks like a case of Jewishness being Schrodinger’s ethnicity. On the one hand, the idea that ethnic groups can be bearers of historically-based moral claims, rights, debts and responsibilities has been core to the justification of Zionism in the West. It’s essentially the reason why people who regard themselves as liberals make a Palestine exception, and either support or turn a blind eye to a brutal ethnonationalist project.
But on the other hand, when the self-proclaimed Jewish state commits genocide, and mainstream Jewish institutions – almost uniformly – across the Western world disgrace themselves by running cover for it, and polling of diaspora populations in many countries is fairly horrifying: suddenly we’re methodological individualists, and any attempt to analyse this collective moral rot and its consequences is useless and distasteful.
As to the rest of your post: ‘Real Zionism has never been tried!’
I’m curious exactly what you and Mourinho are advocating here regarding denunciations of Jews as a group.
To take up one of Mourinho’s examples, I wouldn’t get my knickers in a bunch about an anonymous Iraqi saying the US is evil. It’s understandable given what the US government, with broad public support, put their country through. Black Americans holding anti-white attitudes, Ukrainians holding anti-Russian attitudes, etc., are also totally understandable. But these are emotions I expect people to keep under control when engaged in purposeful political activity. If an American leftist were to argue in public that the US really is evil, I would ask this leftist whether they’re venting emotionally, want to lose politically, or are some kind of undercover right-wing operative. Certainly, what they’re doing hurts the left.
It’s fine for people like Noah Smith to analyze bad behavior that’s endemic to Jewish institutions. And there’s nothing wrong with polling groups like Jews and objectively analyzing the results. Those activities can provide actionable knowledge. But saying things like “Jews [per se] are complicit” or that Jews are afflicted with a “collective moral rot” are of a different nature, obviously–they’re like the leftist saying America is evil. (By the way, if polling data justified such language, a ton of groups, including Palestinians, would be morally rotten.)
Denouncing Jews as a group is particularly counter-productive given the lie that criticizing Israel is in and of itself anti-semitic. Saying that Jews per se are complicit or are afflicted with moral rot is anti-Semitic, just as the Iraqi in Mourinho’s example who says the US is evil is anti-American. At the very least, having to explain how these kinds of statements aren’t anti-Semitic puts you in a needlessly difficult position.
Somewhat unrelatedly, in the article Mourinho links above, Noah Smith repeatedly claims, without evidence, that anti-Israel campus protesters rarely supported Hamas or the Oct 7 massacres. All the evidence points to widespread support for both. You can actually find groups straight up backing what happened on Oct. 7 if you look at what the main encampment organizers themselves were saying. For example:
Students for Justice in Palestine (probably the biggest group in the encampment movement)
Palestinian Youth Movement
Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights (McGill)
Then there’s Within Our Lifetime, a national group, whose official line is “all forms of resistance are valid.” They emphasized, shortly after Oct. 7, that Palestinians have the right “to resist by any means necessary” and that “the liberation of Palestine will be achieved through the initiative and strategy of all forms of Palestinian resistance.” It’s a very short and direct logical step to the conclusion that the Oct. 7 massacres were valid and will contribute to Palestinian liberation. Nobody inside the movement called any of this out.
The root of the problem is the idea, fashionable among protesters, that you should never question how “the colonized” choose to resist.
Nobody suddenly became a “methodological individualist”: everyone opposed to bigotry has long accepted that you don’t treat a collection of people (Jews, blacks, red-heads, Israelis, Mexicans) as a collective — to be blamed or praised, welcomed or shunned, labeled as this or that, etc. — just because some institutions act on their behalf. Mistreating or sitgmatizing someone, just because of who they were born to, doesn’t suddenly become okay because, say, the NAACP speaks of “our people” or makes rights claims on behalf of African Americans. Same for the ADL, or the State of Israel.
Do I seriously have to remind you of this in the present day?
It’s especially troubling, I should add, when this is the only collective, in the current global arena, that people are seeking to demonize in a general way in light of institutional behavior. Is the need to hate a group of people, and beyond states or policies, so insatiable? Or is it just when it’s this group of people?
Not that I necessarily disagree with your argument here, but I just want to note that your subsequent claim (re “especially troubling”) strikes me as false. Islamophobia exists, and is fairly widespread—and even factors as a justification for the actions that states and institutions take against Muslim-majority communities, going beyond scrutiny of “states or policies” and targeting individuals or communities because they are Muslim.
I just thought I’d mention that I’ve most often heard the claim that the end of Jewish supremacy would mean the end of the state of Israel coming from Israelis and defenders of Israel. Most leftists (including left-wing Jewish critics of Israel) these days are arguing for a one-state solution where all members of the that nation-state, including those in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, would have the same democratic rights as everyone else in the country. The response I have often heard to this proposal is that such a solution would be the destruction of Israel as a state (and then usually implied that such advocacy is therefore antisemitic). I think this claim can only really be made if one sees the very concept of Israel to be necessarily tied to Jewish supremacy.
Over time, given demographic trends, a one-state solution might well mean that Israel would cease being a distinctively Jewish state (of which there’s more than one operational definition, but that’s a side point). One’s attitude to the one-state solution will accordingly probably depend at least to some extent on whether one favors the continued existence of Israel as a Jewish state of some kind. But advocating a one-state solution is not antisemitic (on any reasonable definition of antisemitism).
On the practical question, I’m not persuaded that a one-state solution (as usually meant) has any realistic chance of happening. The prospects of a two-state solution are dim right now also, but in my view it is at least conceivable in the medium term if among other things there are changes in leadership and political dynamics on both sides (admittedly a big “if”). There’s perhaps also another possibility, namely some form of consociation, but I’ll leave that to someone else to discuss if they want.
Your thoughtful remark recognizes only two options, Jewish supremacy or a one-state alternative. But I’m trying to point out there’s a third option: a Jewish state, in some sense (e.g. refugee protection and resettlement, escape from anti-Semitism, recognition or celebration of heritage), but not at the expense of any non-Jewish citizens who, like non-Catholic citizens of, say, Costa Rica, or non-French Canadians in a hypothetical French Quebec, would enjoy equal rights. A country’s official identification with its predominant religion or culture need not come with legal or political teeth, or any concrete disadvantage for anyone. The thin idea of a “Jewish state,” on which the otherwise unrecognizably divergent camps of “Zionism” convered in the 1940s, didn’t require any. What IS clear, though, is that simply dismantling the current Jewish state of Israel is not a realisitc non-violent option. Better, as I keep saying, to change the policies and eliminate any trace of “supremacy,” which was never essential.
Genuinely curious: if the Iraq war justifies Iraqis in viewing America as evil and rooted in evil, and this war justifies Palestinians in viewing Israel as evil and rooted in evil, why doesn’t the 2000 year history of subjugation in European societies, and the 1400 year history (approximately) of subjugation in Arab societies, justify Jews in believing that European and Arab societies are evil and rooted in evil, and therefore justify them in wanting to live in a state that reliably liberates them from this evil? (To be clear again: my Zionism doesn’t depend on belief that these societies are evil at their root; I don’t believe this, so this is independent of my own reasons for being a Zionist). This is a genuine question, not a gotcha. I want to understand your position. My assumption is you think that viewing Arab societies and European societies as rooted in evil has to involve attributing this evil to inherent qualities of the people rather than the societies themselves, but I don’t see why this need be so. Alternatively, you might think there’s some deep distinction between states and societies, but I suspect this will be hard to defend. A third possibility is that you think it is an overgeneralization for Jews to attribute the evil to all European societies and Arab societies just because they were justified in believing that the ones they were living in were evil. But it doesn’t seem like an overgeneralization if you think Jews identified a shared root cause of the evil among these societies, namely religious traditions with deep ideological commitments to anti Jewishness. A fourth possibility is that you differentiate Arab societies from European societies and buy into the narrative that Arab societies were good to the Jews. If that’s your view, I think we just have an intractable disagreement about history. Anyhow, just curious about what the crucial difference is, because the obvious ones don’t seem to make a difference.
Thanks for the question. I’m happy to clarify. The state of Israel, now, and the state of Israel, generally are relevant at two different points. While
(i) the petition asks for the APA to issue a condemnation for actions being taken now,
(ii) my argument for why American philosophers, specifically, ought to be concerned with such a condemnation has something to do with the state of Israel, generally (just to be clear, it is not even close to the only piece of that argument—I mentioned the three points just as those which hadn’t been discussed much on DailyNous).
As Patrick Wolfe says, settler colonialism is a structure not an event. Furthermore, it is a structure of institutions. So, when I say, “the state of Israel is a white supremacist settler colonial creation”, I am making a claim about Israeli institutions, not Israeli people. I certainly would not want to claim that all, or even most, or even many Israeli people are white supremacists. Especially since a large number of Israeli people (n.b. Israelis who are Mizrahi, Sephardic, or Ethiopian Jews) are themselves people who suffer from the white supremacy of Israeli institutions. Furthermore, if I were naming the people primarily responsible for the white supremacy of the state of Israel, the majority of that list would probably not be Israelis. I would say more responsibility lies with leaders and elites from the United States, Britain, the west, and the Soviet Union. This is why I said in my second post, “So please absolutely talk about what is happening to Palestinians at the hands of Israel and the United States in terms of genocide.”
So, no—it is simply not true that when I say Israel is a white supremacist settler colonial creation that I’m stigmatizing all Israelis. In fact, I make it a point to speak as explicitly as I do of the state of Israel because I do not want my remarks to be taken in anything close to anti-Israeli or antisemitic ways. Again, looking at my second post, you’ll notice I also mentioned multiple resources that were about creating solidarity with Jewish people in the fight for Palestinian liberation.
In the same way, I am not stigmatizing all citizens of the United States when I say the USA is a white supremacist settler colonial creation. You seem to suggest that I wouldn’t say such things about the USA. Again, this is not true. It’s actually the starting point of much of my work. See, for example, the following passages from my 2023 article with Dr. Claudia Ford, “Environmental Radicalism: Talking About a Revolution”
“The United States was only able to exist and become a player on the world stage by committing atrocity after atrocity against Black peoples and bodies, Indigenous peoples, and land.” P. 134
“We find that no true radicalism can exist outside of antiracist spaces since nothing exists in our social world as institutions outside of hegemonic white supremacy. As political philosopher Charles Mills reminds us:
An objective look at the world reveals that independent Third World nations are part of a global economy dominated by white capital and white international lending institutions, that the planet as a whole is dominated by the cultural products of the white West, that many First World nations have experienced a resurgence of racism, including biologically deterministic ideas once thought to have been definitively discredited with the collapse of Nazi Germany, and that in general the dark-skinned races of the world, particularly blacks and indigenous peoples, continue to be at or near the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder in both metropolitan and Third World polities.
Moreover, if one were to identify a particular hegemonic regime, it would have to be the United States of America, a nation formed as part of a 531-year genocidal campaign against Indigenous peoples of the Americas and the violently exploited labor and bodies of tens of millions of enslaved peoples of African descent. The country’s founding documents, which supposedly appointed it as a beacon of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” for all, declared that people of African descent each counted as only three-fifths of a human, and that Indigenous people were “merciless Indian savages.” These views were central to the birth of the nation and have not been aberrations in the nation’s history.” p. 115
Furthermore, we say similar things about the European imperial and settler colonial states, more generally, in a follow-up 2024 article, “Climate Justice and Global Development: Outlining a New Framework from the work of Achille Mbembe and Charles Mills”.
“[current] development projects suffer from allowing the countries responsible for past and present environmental harms to play an overrepresented procedural role in making decisions about climate justice. We cannot expect those who have created, benefitted from, and been educated in ways meant to ignore damages from climate injustice to solve these problems. Most global development success metrics also place imperial and settler colonial powers high on their indices. We believe an honest look at the historical genesis of climate injustice will conclude that any conception of development which encourages becoming like the United States, Canada, Britain, France, Spain, Germany, Portugal, Russia, the Netherlands, and Australia is not taking the existential threats of the climate emergency seriously. Furthermore, principles of standpoint epistemology, truth and reconciliation, reparations, healing, transformative and restorative justice would all require centering those most impacted by climate injustices in the strategy and decision-making for resolving these challenges.”
You also mention rising violence against Jewish and Israeli people. I, too, am horrified by this. Antisemitic violence is horrible. It also seems directly connected to the rise of the MAGA movement and rhetoric from Donald Trump, Tucker Carlson, and Marjorie Taylor Greene. I have seen no evidence that any talk of white supremacist settler colonialism has been connected to such violence. Furthermore, I am aware of, and have contributed to, an entire sub-discipline dedicated to the violent and deleterious impacts of silence about white supremacy. The epistemology of racial ignorance is a thriving field, which I’d encourage you to investigate. I also know that white supremacist settler colonialism is a useful lens through which we can fight the antisemitism of Donald Trump, Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Greene, et al.
Finally, you ask me to consider my words and speech for possible deadliness. Thank you for doing so. I am always going to encourage all of us to consider our words, our speech, our actions for possible deadliness. None of us seem to be sufficiently aware of how much our world runs on violence. In the same spirit, I’d ask you to do the same, please. As part of that process, I’d ask what made you decide it was more important to respond to a post that was about the state of Israel and act as though it were a generalization about Israelis, when there are posts in this thread that directly include generalizations about Palestinians—who are experiencing a genocide—and those who support them that you didn’t respond to? Again, I’m cool with the fact that you asked me to check myself for anti-Israeli and antisemitic bias. I think we should all do that. I’m not cool with the fact that, if you did that, you didn’t ask others to check blatant anti-Palestinian bias. I’d ask Justin Weinberg to reflect similarly about his moderation of comments in this thread.
Thanks for the clarification, Matt LaVine, that is helpful and reassuring.
Two replies, for now: I haven’t read many of the comments on this thread yet, including apparently the ones you allude to, but I absolutely oppose demonization of Palestinians, whatever one thinks of, say, Hamas, and I’ve called it out many times in forums much less safe and anonymous than this one. It’s unacceptable. Period. You don’t demonize Palestinians or “The Palestinians” or “the Gazans” because of Hamas, or, really, because of anything — just as we don’t demonize Russians because of what Putin, or the Russian Federation, does. To do that is to stigmatize a particular person, like a Palestinian child, just because of whom they were born to, which is the very definition of bigotry.
Second, you say you aren’t demonizing Israelis, just the type of state that, thanks to various historical forces — many beyond Israel and Zionism — Israel has been set up to be.
I agree that’s not your intent, and I’m glad. But once a state as a whole becomes the object of antipathy, hostility and “opposition” — as in being, simply, “anti-Israel” — the kind of stigmatizing I’m worried about becomes inevitable. A state is not just a particular administration now in power, or the institution of government; it’s the country, the whole thing. Even the fledgling “state,” such as it was, that emerged in Gaza when Israel withdrew in 2004, paving the way for Hamas’s rise to power, was demonized too much as a kind of hateful, Jihaddist society. Which was wrong and unfair, especially to individual Gazans who were too easily “othered.”
Again, one should restrict one’s condemnation to the particular people in power and the policies they’re carrying out; you don’t get to be “anti” a state as a whole. That has to be simply off the table. The alternative is a guarantee of perpetual conflict and violence where anyone’s a legitimate target. It’s probably part of why we’re here today.
Bracketing arguments on whether Israel is a white supremacist state, or that the APA board is racist, the fact that they condemned the war in Ukraine is pretty damning, no?
Presumably, and by the logic of Israel-supporters, Israel is a nation state and is bound to the responsibilities and duties that bound all nation states. If you want to be one you have to behave like one. Systematically decimating Palestinian culture centers, universities, and hospitals, starving its population, killing journalists seems absolutely indefensible by the same standards that motivated the Ukraine position.
I’m happy to be corrected. Am I missing something?
Not only that, but the statement was endorsed by the board itself (https://www.apaonline.org/news/597783/APA-board-endorses-SAR-statement-in-solidarity-with-the-people-of-Ukraine.htm?hl=en-US): in direct contradiction with what the board says above (member-voted resolutions; if there was such a process in the Ukraine case, it is not mentioned at all in the release, which says multiple times that the board made the endorsement). So there also seems to be some gaslighting in the above statement.
It’s not directly in conflict,
“and that even about those issues, the board should not presume to speak for the association as a whole when it judges that the membership is likely to be deeply divided on the issue in question.”
The board presumably did not judge that the members of the APA would be deeply divided on the Russia-Ukraine case but have done so on the Israel-Palestine case.
Right. That possibility is pretty damning for the APA, for reasons others have pointed ouy below. To the point where lack of consistency is better.
Presumably the difference is that Ukraine was not deemed particularly controversial.
I signed the petition. I can accept the decision that it’s not the organization’s place to take a stand on such matters. I can accept that it might only do so after a vote by the membership. I can also accept that maybe it shouldn’t have taken some of the stands it took in the past. Indeed, I’m not surprised that it refused to take a stand this time. This is a hard needle for an academic organization to thread, and I understand and accept that. My views differ, but there’s plenty of room for reasonable disagreement.
I am deeply uncomfortable, however, with the idea that the board can issue statements on “uncontroversial” matters, but requires a vote for “controversial” ones. I am also uncomfortable with sweeping this one under the rug because it’s “controversial”.
I agree that it’s likely to be a divisive issue for a chunk of the membership. But the reasons for that divisiveness don’t strike me as very good in the first place, based on what I’ve seen philosophers write here and elsewhere. Climate change is divisive too, but one side of that divide does not deserve to be given the time of day.
So anyway, this particular articulation, complete with the very carefully worded even-handed condemnation of all sides, sounds cowardly to me.
I don’t know what to do with or about that, but that’s my view.
I understand those who insist that the APA should not take a stand on issues directly unrelated to professional philosophers who work at American universities. But, I think that if this is the position of the APA, it should be clearly articulated. But, the APA muddies the waters by taking positions on goings-on in Ukraine and Hungary.
But, since many Israeli philosophers participate in APA events and there are at least two Israeli universities with formal institutional arrangements linking their programs with American universities, it seems that there is more connecting the profession of American philosophy with Israel than with either Ukraine or Hungary. So, a case could be made that simply because the American institution of professional philosophy has strong ties with Israel, we as American philosophers have standing to speak on matters relating to professional philosophy in Israel.
To that end, at the very least, we, as a profession, could express official condemnation of any Israeli university with which we have ties aiding or even tacitly supporting the mass slaughter of innocents in Gaza, or at least the mass destruction of nearly every (every?) university, and therefore every philosophy program, in Gaza.
If officially condemning tacit acceptance of or even complicity w/ the horrors in Gaza by the very Israeli institutions with which we are formally linked is a bridge too far for many American philosophers, then this is evidence that we are not serious about *any* professional politics. If we cannot speak out against our professional links, or even the possibility of professional links, to the horrors in Gaza, then it is hard to view our professional association as anything other than hypocritical and unserious when it speaks out against more local attacks on democracy. As Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose work many philosophers probably teach, said, “If you can’t stand up against genocide, why should I believe you can stand up for democracy?”
For those who think that “…the state of Israel is a white supremacist settler colonial creation,” or that it is attempting or committing genocide in Gaza, etc.:
Wouldn’t it be much better to engage with the best arguments opposed to your position, and show that your position comes out on top?
A good first step toward doing that would be to actually discover what the opposing positions are, and to learn which of the ‘facts’ your side takes for granted are at the very least under dispute, and in some cases clearly refuted, so that you can have some chance at reaching a fair verdict on the matter.
It is truly embarrassing to see so many people run their mouths about this without even having a grip on the other half of the argument, and without any apparent awareness of how much of what they’re saying is in dispute or flat-out incorrect.
I mean, some people will come down on the Hamas side, and some people will come down on the Zionist side, and there are many complicated positions that can’t be described as either, and that’s perfectly understandable and respectable. But the level of ignorance on display *about the nature of the dispute* does not show philosophers at their best.
This is on a par with a ‘dispute’ among philosophers about the existence of God in which it is repeatedly asserted that a personal God exists, since the teleogical argument proves it (with nobody giving any sign of knowing the major objections against it), and the argument from evil being dismissed, apparently because nobody knows any better, as something or other to do with people being angry with God.
Here’s a positive suggestion. Gregg H. Rosenberg’s _Zionism and Anti-Zionism_ came out just a few months ago. It’s an up-to-date, well-informed, philosophical response to anti-Zionism. Why not have a thread in which those who support anti-Zionism critically engage with Rosenberg’s arguments after actually reading the book and learning what the other side is saying, etc., and in which others who come to agree with Rosenberg can defend his arguments against them?
Wouldn’t that be a clearly better way to respond, given that we’re philosophers and given what we tell the world, and ourselves, about the importance of what we do?
On the question of whether or not they’re committing genocide, I don’t think it’s reasonable that philosophers make that call. All you have to do is defer to the experts on genocide, and the organizations whose job it is to make calls like these, and notice that across the board the label of genocide is applied with few exceptions. There isn’t really much dispute over this.
This is equivalent to asking philosophers to form opinions on something like the latest research in semiconductors. No, you can (and should, presumably) defer to the experts on issues like this.
You find it beyond dispute that Israel *is* attempting genocide here — in fact, you go farther than that and say that Israel is *committing* genocide. That is a great illustration of my point.
That claim is not only in dispute but, on its face, preposterous for reasons that have been articulated many times (though you give no evidence of having heard them).
First: if Israel’s main goal were to slaughter all the Palestinians (that is, commit genocide against them), they have had the military power to do for a very long time now. They could easily have done that years ago, and it would not take long for it to be done. Israel’s best way of doing that would involve a day of far more extensive bombing campaigns, rather than sending soldiers into the Gaza where they have to engage with Hamas fighters. It would make no sense for Israel to issue warnings, etc.: how does that fit in with the supposed genocide plan? And so on.
Second: Why do you make no comment of Hamas’s intentions to commit genocide? In the October 7th attacks two years ago, the terrorists brutally and cruelly murdered as many civilians as they could in Israel, and made no secret of the fact that they wished to kill far more. Hamas officials swore immediately after that large-scale massacre that it was intended to be the first of many more. In fact, high-ranking Hamas representatives routinely say such things. Does this not count as a clear attempt to commit genocide? Are you aware of the fact that Article Seven of the 1988 Hamas Covenant reads, in part,
Of course, people can re-define the term ‘genocide’, like any other term, however they like. Anyone looking at the term and its history that it properly refers to the killing off of an entire race of people, but a suitably politicized body could restrict the definition of the term so that it only refers to a pair of bananas that share a stem, or expand it so that it refers to anything whatsoever. There are no doubt highly convoluted ways to define the term, such that it refers to what Israel has been doing but not to what Hamas has been doing. But why should that matter? And why not use a different term for that?
Your answer, it seems, is that the experts have spoken, and we must defer to the experts, so Israel is committing genocide, Hamas is presumably not, and that’s that. But what makes the unnamed people and organizations you refer to the experts on the matter? Do you believe that they all approached this question fairly and impartially, arguing the matter through, until even the experts who originally held the opposite view could see that they were rationally compelled to change their position in the face of the unanswerable arguments presented, and the experts ended up united in consensus? Really?
And how about the noted researchers on the subject who have come to exactly the opposite conclusion as these so-called experts you cite? Why don’t we have an epistemic obligation to defer to them, on your view? How did they come to be ruled out as authoritative experts in a non-question-begging manner?
The fact that these things are not discussed in so many of these conversations — and it seems most likely to me that that’s because so few people in the conversations even know the broad outlines of the overall discussion, well-versed though they are on the carefully curated things that support their own side — is a good sign that something has gone very wrong. Again: we’re philosophers. We are supposed to be good at noticing these kinds of problems, and withholding judgment until these glaring deficiencies in the conversation have been remedied.
Organizations
Genocide Scholars and Experts
As you can see, this sample list includes academics and organizations one can reasonably expect are experts on the topic. You can no doubt find a handful of serious experts that disagree, but you could do that for practically every conflict or genocide ever.
I don’t think people realize just how much across the board experts agree on the fact that Israel is committing genocide or genocidal violence. “In May 2025, NRC wrote that leading scholars in genocide studies are “surprisingly unanimous” that Israel is committing genocide.”
So to answer your question, “Do you believe that they all approached this question fairly and impartially, arguing the matter through, until even the experts who originally held the opposite view could see that they were rationally compelled to change their position in the face of the unanswerable arguments presented, and the experts ended up united in consensus? Really?”
Yes. This is as close to consensus you will get by any group of experts on an issue like this. I think while your comment may have made sense in December of 2023, it is a few years late and even previous supporters of the war, or those who want to insist “we just do not know enough!” have walked those claims back. It is beyond defensible at this point really.
I provided you with a seemingly powerful reason for doubting that Israel is committing, or even intends to commit, genocide. You ignore that completely.
I provided you with seemingly strong evidence that Hamas intends to commit genocide against the Jews in Israel (and in fact beyond Israel). You ignore that completely, too.
Instead, you give me a list of people and organizations — you begin, revealingly, with an advocacy organization for Palestinian rights — who have made or somehow endorsed the genocide accusation against Israel, and rest (as before) on their supposed status as experts.
I already pointed out some problems with this. You ignore them. The only mention you give to anything I said is your concession that there are others of at least equal objective expertise who disagree. Your response? You admit that others may disagree (you say ‘a handful’, but in fact you clearly have no idea how many), but you don’t care because there are always others who disagree.
Then, proving that you don’t even understand the problem I raised with treating these sources as so expert in the matter that we should just defer to them unthinkingly, you say that this constitutes a ‘consensus of experts’. But to establish that, you would have to know how many other organizations and researchers on the matter disagree. You don’t know that, though. You just keep hearing within your echo chamber that everyone who’s important agrees.
Do you realize that equal tactics on the other side can be used, and are used? Do you understand that a long list of experts and organizations you have probably never heard of are being presented to people who disagree with you, and that the people reading those lists are convinced by them because they live in an opposing echo chamber and have never heard of the people on your list? Do you honestly not see how simple a swindle this is to pull? Does none of this stoke your curiosity one iota?
No, it does not. When I acknowledged that there were certainly many people and organizations that had reached your conclusion but raised problems with it, you responded by showing that many people and organizations reached your conclusion, and ignored the problem. QED?
One more point here: your initial reason for saying that we should not even think or dispute about whether Israel is committing a genocide, and should just reverently trust ‘the experts’ on the matter and move on, is that we philosophers are no more an expert on what constitutes a genocide than we are on the current state of superconductor research. Well, whose job do you think it is, exactly, to determine the most reasonable scope of the term ‘genocide’ or the genocide-concept? Does it not jump out to you that that’s exactly the sort of thing philosophers discuss? Is there any way of figuring that out without using the philosophical analysis? How?
But on your account, we philosophers should leave it to other people to do that philosophical work, and defer silently and obediently to their expertise.
Amazing. It’s not amazing in itself that you would say such a thing, but it is amazing that, on a widely-read blog about philosophy that caters mostly to philosophers, your comment didn’t generate a sharp and extensive pile-on. And yet…
But Mourhino, Kalef can easily counter this list with a couple of Free Press articles! So that counterbalances your evidence. Back to square one on this one, I guess.
If, counterfactually, that were all that could be provided in response (in fact, I could provide thousands of citations in the opposite direction if given enough time and energy), your reasoning would be convincing… to anyone who thinks that determining the right and wrong or true or false of some issue is a matter of counting up the number of people who think one thing rather than another.
In other words, to people who aren’t familiar with the fallacy of appeal to popularity.
Justin, I think you’re quite mistaken on the point of there being dozens of scholars of genocide who contest the label. No doubt you will find politicians or op-eds denying it, but if you go through my comment again you’ll note that this is as close to consensus you’ll get on an issue like this. The experts here are in agreement, no matter how much we pontificate about human shields or radical islam.
The thing that gets me about these genocide apologia pieces that Justin K. seems fond of is that they want to pretend they’re haviing a Serious Scholarly Debate here. Which, well, sure, whatever… You can do that, I guess. But it seems that most of those who want to have that “debate,” and want to have it right now, are also of the view that, whatever you call it, it should just keep going. In other words, abandoning the term “genocide” and instead insisting on an end to the “war” would not placate them; they want it to continue, and to continue as is, even though they are aware that many view it continuing as is as genocide. We shouldn’t fall for it; that is, we shouldn’t fall for the insistence that we have this “debate.” Those insisting on it, insisting that we can’t call it what it is, aren’t here in good faith anyway.
Mourinho:
I gave you two arguments, one of which casts doubt on the claim that Israel is committing a genocide, and the other of which gives reasons for thinking that, on any plausible account of genocide, Hamas (particularly in the October 7th attack and its vow to keep repeating such attacks) is openly aiming at genocide. You gave no response to either of those arguments.
Instead, you provide a long list of people and organizations who agree with the claim. But I never denied in any way that there are all sorts of people who think this. Believe me, if I wanted to, I could shower you with names of people and organizations that hold exactly the opposite view. I take it that you do not need to be shown this.
The whole point is that appeals to authority on this matter — especially highly selective appeals to authority that conveniently ignore all the many authorities that disagree with you — are worthless on a moral and conceptual issue like determining whether certain sorts of actions constitute genocide or are morally wrong.
Yes, of course there are people who originally disagreed with your view who have now accepted your view. But there are also many people who originally agreed with your view who have now abandoned it, and people who were originally undecided and have now decided that the view opposite to yours is correct. Once again: selective citing of experts (or supposed experts) never establishes anything.
Moreover, I’d like you to explain to me what, on your view, the intended APA statement was meant to accomplish. I had thought that the idea was to tell the general public that we philosophers had, through our philosophical analysis and the application of the moral thinking we are trained to undertake, reached a consensus(?) that Israel is committing a genocide, and so on. But you have now made clear that you think that we philosophers know these things on the basis of appeals to actual or supposed authorities (mostly outside of philosophy), and that there is actually no point having philosophers question or work through these things on our own.
If that’s the case, then why exactly should anyone be impressed by what philosophers conclude (if we have indeed concluded it) on the basis of trusting second-hand claims by these supposed authorities?
i’m not a very sophisticated philosopher, so the first thing i notice is how there are an awful lot more people dying on one side than the other.
That’s a reasonable first thing to notice. But it’s only a first thing.
The next thing to notice — and the main reason why that’s far from conclusive — is the key moral question here, which is what to do against an enemy, like Hamas, that has an open policy of using its own people as human shields, exposing them to harm whenever possible, since the main weapon they are using in this war is international public opinion. The deaths of individuals and families on their own side are to them well worth it if they can use the resulting inequality in fatalities, and the terrible situation of their own people, to bring about the destruction of Israel through the erosion of what international support it has.
Hence, the regular Hamas war crimes against its own people by, for instance, forcing Palestinians in Gaza to keep Hamas armaments in their own homes, the mixing together of combatant and civilian infrastructure, the use non-uniformed fighters in well-populated civilian areas, the refusal to allow non-Hamas fighters to take refuge in the tunnel networks, and so on.
And now comes the moral question: what should be done in such cases? Given these highly unethical tactics by Hamas, Israel must choose between continuing to fight Hamas at the cost of the lives of many innocent Palestinian civilians in Gaza, or else allowing Hamas to triumph through those methods on general principle.
True, there are some philosophers committed to radical pacifism or anti-consequentialist frameworks from which it would follow that, once Hamas chooses to use tactics like that, Israel must stop fighting them and just allow for its own destruction, which no doubt would involve a much larger October-7th-style massacre across the country, and the death of every Jew in Israel as the land gets taken over by Hamas.
If such a rule were followed, then any other terrorist group would know that it only needs to put its own civilians in danger in a similar way, and it will achieve its political goals, whatever they are. But some radical anti-consequentialists would perhaps swallow that bitter pill.
If we were doing our jobs as philosophers, we should expect the places where we congregate to be filled with discussions about this issue, with different people arguing for different lines we must not cross no matter what Hamas (or any similar group) does to its own civilians, and no matter what is at stake, and others arguing against such lines altogether.
Instead, we have a situation where the basic facts and strategies are so little known that none of this is discussed at all. Instead, people continue to make inferences like “Whichever side has suffered many more fatalities must be in the right,” without even knowing what else there is to consider, including who decided to conduct the war like that in the first place.
The embarrassment for philosophy here is not the conclusion that people are coming to. The embarrassment is the number of people who are so caught up in this echo chamber that they no longer have access to any opposing considerations, and don’t even realize that opposing considerations exist, but who nonetheless think that there’s adequate grounds for an informed consensus among philosophers here — and not only a consensus, but such a clear one that the APA should have made a public statement reflecting that supposedly informed consensus.
this is sophistry.
Please look at this exchange between ‘An adjunct’ and me. Look for the usual signs of which side is engaging sincerely, which side is addressing the points of the other side, and which side is interested in the process of giving, hearing, and weighing reasons before coming to a conclusion.
Also, look for the usual signs of one side being unwilling to live up to the epistemic and dialectical duties we always claim to care about as philosophers.
Then consider which view tends to be supported by the cultural elite today: is it the one that is dismissed without argument, or the one that has been argued for here?
If you imagine this same thing happening over and over again, for all these sorts of cases — with the same echo chamber dynamics every time — then you will be left with a realistic impression of the pathetic level of dialectic we’ve now fallen to, and a good appraisal of how likely it is that the most reasonable view will come out on top after a fair examination of the relevant factors.
If, after doing that, anyone here is still prepared to treat the ‘consensus’ of today’s philosophers as authoritative on any hot-button issue whatsoever, I don’t know what to tell you.
I did. This is sophistry.
If, as it seems, you are using the term ‘sophistry’ to mean ‘something that puts pressure on something someone else is strongly committed to’, then yes.
But the ongoing failure to respond to a single point I made is telling.
As in failure to respond to a substantive point: yes, nothing of the stort.
As for shielding you from other critique, ask Justin W. Because he seems to be shielding you from any substantive counter argument, as far as I can see (including those censored comments).
The two comments of yours that were not approved — there were only two — were just insults. There was nothing substantive to them.
ditto.
so is this the only comment that won’t be censored, Justin W.?
OK, kids. Time for a timeout.
It is sophistry but it’s worth saying a bit more about it. An essayist I quite like, Phil Christman, has some very perceptive things to say about this kind of sophistry. The whole post is worth reading but control F Joachim of Fiore and start from there if you’re in a hurry.
If you’re in a real hurry though, it boils down to this: Academics and especially liberal academics are quite prone to fall for the sophistical move where someone distracts us from a very simple question or questions they desperately do not want to consider by raising a much more complicated one. So instead of discussing simple questions with obvious right and wrong answers like “Is it morally acceptable to bomb hospitals?”, “Is it morally acceptable for snipers to shoot unarmed women sheltering in a church?”, “Is it wrong to bomb hospitals?”, Is it wrong to starve a population en masse?”, “Should human beings be reduced to feeding their infants salt and starch because they have no formula?” and hundreds more such questions we’re spinning our wheels debating the meaning of Zionism or genocide.
Academic training makes you sensitive to the ways the world is complex. But one way it’s complex is that some questions aren’t complex at all. That’s a point worth remembering.
And just to head off the obvious reply here I will quote what Christman says will happen when you pose the really clear and important questions when faced with this sort of sophistry rather than getting into an argument about Joachim of Fiore or the precise definitions of Zionism and genocide as the case may be:
“You will be called ‘simplistic,’ ‘vulgar,’ ‘midwit,’ ‘paranoid.’ They will accuse you of emotional manipulation, even if you avoid charged language. It’s the simplicity and clarity they can’t stand.”
We’ve seen quite a bit of that already. I forecast a bit more to come.
THANK YOU, Enrico. This does an excellent job capturing something I’ve been unable to articulate about so much discourse by analytic philosophers around political issues, both Gaza and otherwise.
Just seconding, Preston’s THANK YOU, Enrico! just says what’s been so hard for me to articulate about so much discourse by analytic philosophers around political issues like these.
Enrico, you’re putting the cart before the horse here. You and others are clearly highly committed to your views on this matter, and seem to find it so objectionable to have to respond to arguments or considerations that go against your conclusion that you dismiss them as sophistry and even go so far as to try to analyze what kind of sophistry they are.
But this gets things backward. If you want to dismiss some reasoning as sophistry, you first have to determine make sure that it goes wrong and that it’s not just that you feel strongly that it is wrong. You don’t get to skip that part and start referring to it as sophistry.
Look: I agree with you that it is clearly prima facie wrong to bomb a hospital, to take your first example. I’ll leave aside, for now, the inconvenient fact that the media worldwide accepted and hyped pro-Hamas propaganda falsely claiming that Israel had killed hundreds of civilians in a bomb on a hospital, when in fact (as many trusted media outlets quietly admitted later on, after they actually researched it) the missile had been fired at Israel by terrorists, and had landed in the parking lot of the hospital instead: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Ahli_Arab_Hospital_explosion .
But let’s avoid all that and get to the heart of the philosophical point you’re making. Is it wrong for an army to bomb a hospital? I would say that it is clearly prima facie wrong. But why not say more than that, and assert that it is wrong in the final analysis, in all cases?
To stick to the philosophical point: there are of course excellent reasons for condemning a nation that bombs a hospital. But suppose that I know that, since it is universally agreed that bombing hospitals is wrong, your country has resolved never to attack a hospital. So I take advantage of that fact, let’s say, and form an army that bombs your country, with all its bases (including missile bases) all located entirely within hospitals. I also threaten to kill any patients who leave the hospital, and say that I’ll wipe out their families, too, if they don’t stay in the hospital.
Suppose that there are five thousand patients in these hospitals, and also me and five thousand soldiers. There is no way for you to stop the bombing of your country without bombing the hospital. If I successfully bomb your country for long enough, my side wins the war and will then go in (let’s say) and brutally murder the five million people (let’s say) in your country. And of course, you’re not going to use the same hospital ploy with your own citizens: you have moral principles that I do not share, and also, if you did that, I would just bomb your hospital without a second thought.
Do you think that, in that special case, you are obliged to keep respecting the ‘never bomb hospitals’ rule?
In this case, I’ve presented you with a terrible choice: either you bomb hospitals containing five thousand innocent patients to wipe out an enemy sworn to destroy you, or else you allow me to gain power over you, and to brutally slaughter five million innocent people, and at the same time set a precedent for any other evil organization, giving them an easy way to defeat any principled nation if only they are willing to put enough civilians at risk.
My own view is that, terrible as it is to bomb a hospital, in a case like the one I have just described where there are no clear third options, it seems to be the better choice to bomb the hospital anyway.
Do you disagree?
I know from what you have said that you hate considering these questions philosophically. But I don’t see how else you can be entitled to come to a fair conclusion on the matter. History is littered with the corpses of millions who died because, in the heat of the moment, important people forgot their duty to step back and think about things from the outside.
https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/israeli-troops-targeted-a-camera-in-gaza-hospital-strike-that-killed-20-army-says-6defd392?gaa_at=eafs&gaa_n=ASWzDAjn9IlVaFp4mb58zTOoMvmifi4a9UAnPfxw-s637HuIbvpVSnw31ZPV&gaa_ts=68b18e30&gaa_sig=4AXl2K-CU6ReqE-15SB2GCgUumUrNJUqGg3CBrsqeaL7aTjYH2c2blTslOCi-ntI75dmofZd88rbz3iLjKfbPQ%3D%3D
Do you support bombing hospitals? Yes or no? I say “no”. That’s clarity and analytic philosophy is supposed to be about clarity. What you’re doing is like me saying 2+2 =4 and someone replying well you poor simple minded fellow no no we can’t really know that until we know things like what color the objects are you need to think mathematically. It could be any number! If what you’re doing is thinking philosophically then goodness are we in trouble. But obviously you’re just doing exactly what Christman predicted. Except instead of vulgar or midwit you’re saying philosophical.
Hi, Enrico. Justin Weinberg has asked me to step back from this conversation, so I’ll leave it to others to respond to your comment if they wish to.
It seems like this kind of logic could lead to justify the nuking of an entire country, or should we say, a final solution. If it doesn’t, can you say where you would draw the line. Is there a possible action that Israel could do in Palestine that you would recognize as morally wrong? Or would the claim that Hamas is embedded within the civilian population justify any number of civilian casualties? Cause if you’re arguing that what Israel is doing now is morally permissible or even justified, then it’s very hard for me to see any sort of moral line ever being drawn.
I never said that anything that Israel does in response is morally justified, or that everything that Israel is doing now is morally justified, or even that Israel’s actions are, on balance, morally justified.
But again, Justin Weinberg has asked me to step back from this discussion, so I’ll leave it to others to take this up if they wish.
I’m not a philosopher, just to get that out of the way first.
I don’t agree with how you (J.K.) have framed the questions. In my view Israel was entitled (and indeed in a sense obligated) to respond to the Oct. 7th attack but Israel was not entitled to repeatedly violate the law of armed conflict and prosecute the war in such a way that the result is a very large number of civilian deaths and famine on a mass scale, which is now occurring. That an opponent is using civilians as human shields and embedding itself in the civilian population makes fighting in a discriminate, acceptable way very difficult but it does not give carte blanche to use any tactics and strategies whatsoever. The IDF was faced with a difficult problem but it responded by choosing an unrealistic aim (the complete elimination of Hamas as an entity) and using unacceptable means, and the result has been a disaster (in many different ways). I’m not sure I want to get into a long back and forth but I wanted to reply to you with more than one sentence since others didn’t seem to be doing that.
Hi, Louis.
First, thank you for the spirit of your post. As you say, it’s sadly rare for people fighting for the popular view in threads like this one to engage philosophically with anyone who doesn’t toe the party line (on a philosophy blog…). It’s a sad sign of the times, I think.
I actually agree with you, I think, about more than you seem to believe. Israel was entitled to respond to the October 7th massacre, but doesn’t have carte blanche to do anything whatsoever — right, I feel the same way. The IDF, you say, “was faced with a difficult problem” (I agree) “but it responded by choosing an unrealistic aim… and using unacceptable means…”) I think you might be right about that, I just don’t feel confident. It wasn’t my aim here to show up and defend everything that the IDF is doing or anything like that. It seems that you and I agree that Israel is in a very difficult position. I could be persuaded either way about whether it has pursued the war for too long, or with too unrealistic a final goal. But the matter is, in my view, far more difficult than most people here were taking for granted that it was, and claims about genocide, etc. (which appear in the intended APA petition) seem to me to involve an unfair leap in logic. Especially in a document that was intended to represent the consensus of philosophers, and (I presume) to indicate that its conclusions follow from careful and impartial philosophical analysis, I thought someone had to say something about this. But on many of the exact issues, I haven’t reached a clear conclusion one way or the other.
Still, I want to draw your attention to something you did here. You saw me write something that dismissed some lines of attack against Israel as unfair, and you wanted to jump in and argue that some things that Israel has done are unjustified. Okay, fair enough… but do you not also see that many people in this thread are behaving in ways that are quite dogmatic, dismissive, and unphilosophical? I wonder why you didn’t feel inclined to say anything about any of that.
As you’ll see by reading this thread over, there is no shortage of people who are highly critical of Israel. Adding another voice to that chorus changes almost nothing. But more or less nobody is here pointing out that, like Israel, the anti-Israel side can go too far, and that it doesn’t seem all that great for us to ignore the evidence that our discipline (and this blog) is veering dangerously close to an echo chamber, if it isn’t one already; and that many people are acting deeply unphilosophically here.
You seem to be a thoughtful fellow, from the way you replied. So I hope you’ll think on this: why did you feel inclined to throw in your weight against me, when so many others were already and I’m making points nobody else is making, while saying absolutely nothing against the mob, many of whose members are refusing to engage philosophically at all?
Justin, when you say they have an open policy of using human shields, what does this mean? Amnesty International and various UN experts and Israeli journalists have noted that this framing is incorrect – the density of Gaza or the proximity of military installations near civilian areas isn’t an “open policy of human shields.” Neve Gordon, Israeli professor, who wrote a book on Human Shields in 2020 wrote in December of 2023 that the Israeli claims of Hamas using ‘human shields’ “should be understood as a pre-emptive legal defence against accusations that Israel is committing war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza.” Compare the IDF HQ in the heart of Tel Aviv, the “War Room” as well, a military base beside the Glilot Mall, Shin Bet headquarters in Jerusalem in a residential area. In Ashkelon, Sderot, Bersheva and other towns in the south of Israel, military bases and other installations are located in or around residential areas, including kibbutzim and villages.
I am happy to go through some of your claims line-by-line, such as the claim elsewhere you made here that Hamas is vowing to kill every Jew. This is simply not true – all you have to do is take a look at their 2017 charter which states that their conflict is with Zionism’s expansionist project, not Jews or Judaism. Khaled Mashal, the current leader since Israel assassinated Haniyeh in a foreign embassy and Yahya Sinwar was killed in the battlefield, stated that the old charter is now a part of Hamas’ history and no longer the guiding document.
Mourinho,
Again you seem to think that these matters can be settled by citing selected authorities from one side only as though they resolve the issue, while completely ignoring (if you are even aware of them) all the arguments made by comparable authorities who disagree.
Look: I am very well aware that thousands of people are hard at work making and refining this case and spreading their talking points to anyone, including you, who wants to use them, including all these citations of individuals and organizations you can quote to this effect. Your ability to recite those things over and over may impress other people (especially those who have already accepted a one-sided picture here), but they do not and should not impress anyone who realizes how unprofitable all this is.
If someone were to respond to you in kind — and believe me, this would be very easy — by presenting one-sided propaganda (all with correct citations, carefully curated to exclude all inconvenient points), then he would have no problem matching you point for point. But so long as you both did it with the underlying conviction that you are right and the other side is wrong, and no genuine curiosity about which side is right, no intellectual modesty (so no chance that either of you would be shaken), then you would achieve nothing.
I’m not interested in wasting my time on that. If I want to read deeply biased anti-Zionist material, or deeply biased pro-Zionist material, I know where to find them both. But that would be like thinking that one can come to a fair verdict on a courtroom trial after listening just to one side’s lawyer.
Just this once, I will respond to your claims point by point, so that you can see some weak points. But I have neither the time nor the interest to keep doing this over and over, I’m afraid.
“Justin, when you say they have an open policy of using human shields, what does this mean?”
I am referring to the practice of routinely and deliberately putting combatants, armaments, etc. in civilians’ homes, hospitals, schools, etc, or mixing combatants in with civilians only to have those combatants fire projectile weapons from a crowd of those civilians, so that the opposing army cannot fire on those soldiers or weapons without endangering the civilians. The civilians are thereby used as shields to make it more difficult for a principled army to attack the soldiers or weapons. Hence, human shields.
“Amnesty International and various UN experts and Israeli journalists have noted that this framing is incorrect – the density of Gaza or the proximity of military installations near civilian areas isn’t an ‘open policy of human shields.'”
The word ‘noted’ is question-begging here: you are contending that this framing is correct, but you have not yet established it. All you have done is tell me that Amnesty International (hardly a politically neutral organization!) and *some* UN experts and Israeli journalists *claim* that Hamas has not engaged in the use of human shields in *some* contexts.
If you promise here that you will admit that you have been deeply misled on this matter if I can provide quotes from Israeli journalists arguing for the exact opposite — and quite persuasively, in fact — then I will do so, and we can end the matter here. Do you agree?
“Neve Gordon, Israeli professor, who wrote a book on Human Shields in 2020 wrote in December of 2023 that the Israeli claims of Hamas using ‘human shields’ “should be understood as a pre-emptive legal defence against accusations that Israel is committing war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza.” ”
Yes, a professor in Israel wrote that. Other professors in Israel disagree completely. So what?
“Compare the IDF HQ in the heart of Tel Aviv, the “War Room” as well, a military base beside the Glilot Mall, Shin Bet headquarters in Jerusalem in a residential area. In Ashkelon, Sderot, Bersheva and other towns in the south of Israel, military bases and other installations are located in or around residential areas, including kibbutzim and villages.”
And that, to you, is morally on a par with the heavy use of non-uniformed soldiers walking through crowded areas, concealing armaments and snipers in civilian homes and hospitals, etc.??? Really?
“I am happy to go through some of your claims line-by-line, such as the claim elsewhere you made here that Hamas is vowing to kill every Jew. This is simply not true – all you have to do is take a look at their 2017 charter which states that their conflict is with Zionism’s expansionist project, not Jews or Judaism.”
Ah, so all it takes to prove that it’s ‘simply not true’ that Hamas has vowed to kill every Jew is to look at their 2017 revision of their earlier charter, which attempts to conceal some of the blatant anti-Semitism of the slightly earlier version. Did Hamas repudiate the anti-Semitism of the 1988 version, and say that it was deeply wrong? Do you care? If the Ku Klux Klan were to write a new charter in which it says that its conflict is with multiculturalism and attacks on the Christian American way, but not with black people, would that be enough to convince you that anyone who calls the KKK a racist organization is saying something that’s “simply not true?” Come on.
For the record, here are two quotes out of countless others that could be provided:
1. On April 7th, 2023, the Hamas spokesman Hamad al-Regeb gave a sermon in which he called on Allah to “bring annihilation on the Jews,” to “tear them apart, bring upon them a terrible punishment.” And so on.
2. Ghazi Hamad, a senior Hamas member, was interviewed on Lebanese television on October 24th, 2023, about the October 7th massacre. He explained: “We must teach Israel a lesson, and we will do this again and again. The Al-Aqsa Flood is just the first time, and there will be a second, a third, a fourth, because we have the determination, the resolve, and the capabilities to fight. Will we have to pay a price? Yes, and we are ready to pay it. We are called a nation of martyrs, and we are proud to sacrifice martyrs…I am talking about all the Palestinian lands…We are the victims of the occupation. Period. Therefore, nobody should blame us for the things we do. On October 7, October 10, October 1,000,000 – everything we do is justified.”
“Khaled Mashal, the current leader since Israel assassinated Haniyeh in a foreign embassy and Yahya Sinwar was killed in the battlefield, stated that the old charter is now a part of Hamas’ history and no longer the guiding document.”
Ah, wonderful: let’s talk about the trustworthy and peace-loving Khaled Mashal. Have a look at this excerpt from an interview he gave on Al-Arabiya on October 19th, 2025.
Rasha Nabil, the interviewer, presses him on Hamas’s brutal slaughter of civilians on October 7th: in case you’ve forgotten, this involved the indiscriminate slaughter, rape, and butchery of huge numbers of people who had come from around the world to attend a rave, going from house to house in a kibbutz known for its friendliness and sympathetic work with Palestinians, slaughtering unarmed, noncombatant families with pride and glee, and broadcasting many of these things, live, on the internet. And so on.
Khaled Mashal’s defense of this? Well, you see (if you don’t believe me, watch the interview), he claims that Hamas in fact never targeted civilians. That’s right: turning a music festival into a horror world of death, mayhem, rape, torture and dismemberment, and going from door to door through a peaceful neighborhood and killing every living person in the homes, and broadcasting the whole thing on the internet where it was seen by who knows how many thousands is, to Khaled Mashal, consistent with not targeting civilians.
He also explains in that interview that Hamas will continue those attacks until they are victorious (note that the aim is not just Gaza, but the reconquest of all lands ‘from the river to the sea’, in other words, the entire country of Israel), and that Hamas is not responsible for any civilian deaths that come about as a result.
And this is the man whose word you’re asking me to trust when he claims that Hamas has moved on from the 1988 charter, and now only attacks Israel as a political entity. Well, including all the civilians that get in the way, including noncombatant, peace-loving families in their homes, and international attendees at a music festival, and people like that.
I won’t have the time to keep responding to many of these things, but you have plenty of information there to see that your current picture is extremely one-sided, to say the least.
Whether you care enough about that to stop trusting these people you see as uniquely authoritative is up to you. Good luck.
Justin, this is embarrassing to be honest. My citing of the many sources is because many of these claims are empirical claims – that Hamas regularly walks un-uniformed fighters through civilian areas or hides weapons in hospitals in hospitals are claims one needs evidence for. If you think my citing all these organizations on the ground who have access to these areas, and who have concluded that this is misleading or flat-out IDF propaganda, it is not a fallacious appeal to authority. I don’t really understand why you think we can sit down as philosophers in the USA and decide if there is a genocide happening without taking note of the evidence by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty Intl (which you think is a rabid anti-Zionist organization, lol), B’tselem, experts on human shields, etc.
You are welcome to go through the many sources I gave you, which make use of the empirical data and provide arguments, and explain what makes them deeply biased. Is it because they do not agree with the IDF’s conclusions?
I also find some of the points quite problematic. Earlier you brought up the Ahli hospital and you resort to that example all the time. Are you aware that as of June 2024, according to WHO, Israel has attacked 464 health care facilities, killed 727 health care workers, injured 933 health care workers, and damaged or destroyed 113 ambulances? The International Criminal Court says the claims of weapons being stored there are “grossly exaggerated.” Human Rights Watch says Israel has provided no evidence justifying stripping hospitals of their protection.
I really do not understand what your goal is here. You deride the use of sources which cite and make clear the empirical data, which we are not able to get directly, and then want us to make philosophical arguments about whether or not there’s a genocide? How are we to do that if you think it is deeply biased that every genocide expert and organization thinks Israel is bombing health organizations indiscriminately?
I am satisfied that anyone carefully reading our exchange so far, and noting who is taking care to respond to the opposing points and who is dodging them, will have plenty of information to reach a sensible conclusion. It is also clear that you have still not even understood that it’s question-begging to treat Human Rights Watch, the UN, etc. as neutral authorities in this exchange.
Anyway, Justin Weinberg has asked me to step back from this discussion for now. I don’t know whether it’s profitable to discuss this further, but I’ll leave it to others to do so if they wish to.
@ Mourinho
I am not as conversant as you are with the “on the ground” reports.
However, a few observations.
On the empirical (as distinct from the normative) questions: this is an asymmetric conflict in which one side (IDF) has much more firepower than the other. Hamas is not known as an organization committed to scrupulous observance of the law of armed conflict, and as the militarily weaker side fighting in a very densely populated area, it would only make sense for Hamas to embed itself in the civilian population. I have no idea whether Hamas has hidden weapons in hospitals or not, but more generally it simply would not make much sense militarily for Hamas not to take some advantage of the fact that the density of civilian structures allows — or allowed — it to fight in very close proximity to them. Firing from very very close to a school and firing from inside a school may have a different legal status (I’m not entirely sure), but the claim that Hamas has not fired from at least very close to schools (perhaps used as civilian shelters) just strikes me as implausible, because Hamas is fighting for its existence and it’s going to use basically every tool as its disposal.
That said, on the normative question, I do not think anything can justify the scale of damage to health-care facilities etc. and the scale of civilian casualties that the IDF has inflicted. But to suggest that Hamas has not been trying to take advantage of the dense civilian population and — before many or most of them were reduced to rubble — the density of civilian structures strikes me, as I say, as implausible. Fwiw.
I’ll leave your second point to others, but doesn’t the first have an obvious rebuttal (namely, that it’s not just about committing genocide but doing so in a way that convinces enough people that you’re not committing genocide)? Put another way: you issue warnings, etc., so that you can then point to the fact that you issued a warning and say, “Hey, look, we’re not committing genocide! If we were, we surely wouldn’t issue warnings, now would we? Ah ha, checkmate, nerds!!” It seems to me that that’s exactly what’s happening (just look at what Netanyahu and co. say). And with people like you as the target audience, I’d say it’s working pretty well for them!
Are you doing a comedy bit? You’ve given quite the performance: you without evidence accuse all “those who think” Israel is committing genocide of not knowing the relevant facts or counterarguments. Then give the most entry-level regurgitation of the IDF/Bibi line, resolutely avoiding what you demand of others: preemptively engaging with the best arguments on the other side. When directed to some of these arguments (see the links in Mourinho’s post above), you engage with none of them and instead claim that a random internet comment is deeply revealing about the other side. And later you make the same mistake about appeal to authority that my intro students make. It’s not a fallacy when the authority appealed to is a legitimate epistemic authority, and you haven’t tried to show that the authority Mourinho is appealing to (the community of genocide experts) is illegitimate or has been mischaracterized.
There are plenty of responses to the argument that, since Hamas uses human shields, we can’t conclude that Israel is committing genocide. A good one that Mourinho linked to is Albanese’s UN report. See Chapter VI in particular.
In one of your comments, you equate genocide with “slaughtering all” members of the targeted group. I assume you know the international legal definition of genocide and that it’s not yours (it doesn’t mention killing). But you give no argument for your revisionary definition.
Finally, here’s an absurd false dichotomy from one of your comments: “And now comes the moral question: what should be done in such cases? Given these highly unethical tactics by Hamas, Israel must choose between continuing to fight Hamas at the cost of the lives of many innocent Palestinian civilians in Gaza, or else allowing Hamas to triumph through those methods on general principle.” Israel has already killed Hamas’ top leadership, lots of mid-level leaders, and lots of rank-and-file combatants. The idea that Hamas triumphs “on general principle” unless Israel kills every/most/undefined number of Hamas fighers is silly. On this point, you could read the latest opinion piece by that radical anti-Israel shill Thomas Friedman. And, as Friedman also points out, the assumption that the war is at this point still about defeating Hamas is highly doubtful.
Regarding the definition of genocide, I meant to say that it expressly does not require the destruction of all members of a group.
There’s much to say in response to this, but Justin Weinberg has asked me to step back from this conversation. I’ll leave it to others to reply to you if they wish.
Just another baseless appeal to authority.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/sep/01/israel-committing-genocide-in-gaza-worlds-top-scholars-on-the-say
What Israel has been doing is extremely, extremely horrifying and unacceptable. This is not to say that there has not been much, much worse things happened in the past. But still, what is happening right now, at the current world, is just evil. I am not surprised at APA’s decision, but also because I have already been dismayed by the hypocrisy of the institution.
“Evil” functions less as a philosophical concept than as a gesture of denunciation. Philosophers from Augustine to Arendt have tried to theorise it, but in ordinary political debate the term works mainly as condemnation without clarification. It doesn’t engage arguments on either side. Outrage has its place, but if we’re serious about doing philosophy, “evil” is the label that brings thought to a halt.
This is why the petition is misguided. It confuses philosophy with political theatre. A philosophical association should not codify outrage in official statements; its vocation is to foster reasoned engagement, debate, and the testing of arguments, even the most uncomfortable ones. That is what makes philosophy matter.
“‘Evil’ is the label that brings thought to a halt.”
As thought should.
“‘Evil’ is the label that brings thought to a halt.”
It’s a lofty thing to say but I’m struggling to interpret this in a way that sounds true. It strikes me as plainly false, witnessed by the fact that tracts of political theory (in the non-ideal tradition) are dedicated to how we should reckon with and navigate the aftermath of atrocities. Perfectly serious political philosophy can proceed on the assumption that some actions/episodes constitute genuine evils.
I read it as yet another sophism: conflating two senses of halt. Just because we need to move on and consider the best non-ideal aftermaths does not mean we should not register some acts as evil. This matters both normatively and practically, insofar as it makes certain types of resolutions of the conflict inappropriate and others: called-for.
Labeling something as evil in no way closes the conversation of how to move forward. It merely refuses to take a certain, callous perspective on political events.
Two points: 1) The APA Board issued a statement condemning the Russian invasion of Ukraine within two weeks, speaking as a member organization of Scholars at Risk. Scholars are clearly “at risk” in Gaza — see UN Report on “scholasticide”: https://news.un.org/en/story/2024/04/1148716. It is therefore eminently appropriate for the APA Board to issue a statement about this. 2) Regarding “deep division” in the profession. I have no doubt that there are members who would vehemently oppose the opinions (and deny the facts) expressed in the petition. But that’s not the same thing as assuming that half of more of our members would not support the petition. I’ll be joining the effort to bring this to a membership vote. I believe that most of our members are decent people, hence…well you can finish the inference yourself.
Thanks for writing this Louise.
FWIW I vividly remember in my first year as a grad student at UNC a group of us staged a sit in in the president’s office to try to get him to sign on to a no-sweatshop agreement governing the production of UNC apparel. There was a meeting of faculty with the president (and maybe other big shots) and I was one of the students who was there. You offered a really powerful and moving argument in that meeting. Just wanted to thank you for that 26 years later just as you make the case for this urgent issue today.
What are you hoping that the effect of a statement from the APA would be?
It could have at least some marginal positive effect on the growth of an emerging popular majority contesting unwavering support for Israel’s vile war against Gazans. Impossible to measure of course, but that is just the nature of collective action and politics more generally. This is familiar territory for philosophy.
The Ukraine comparison doesn’t settle the matter in Gaza. Whether the APA was right to issue that statement is itself debatable, but even if it were, precedent here is illustrative, not binding. In law, precedent carries normative weight only within a system like stare decisis; the APA is not such a system. Membership in Scholars at Risk also doesn’t resolve the issue. SAR did issue a Call to Action on Gaza, framed around protecting higher education communities in Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank, urging an end to hostilities and the safeguarding of academic freedom. What the petition asks of the APA is far stronger: a formal condemnation of Israel. That goes well beyond SAR’s own statement, and more importantly, coalition membership does not collapse the APA’s institutional identity into SAR’s. To treat it that way would be to outsource the APA’s own philosophical judgment. The APA can participate in SAR’s work without being bound to every position SAR takes. Its role as a philosophical association requires it to ask, in each case, whether a given statement falls within its mission.
As for division, no one doubts that most members are “decent people.” But decency does not resolve contested interpretations of facts and concepts. Deep division does not require a 50/50 split; even a single well-argued minority position shows that the association cannot credibly present itself as speaking for all members on a contested matter. In philosophy, head-counts are no substitute for arguments. If majoritarianism has limits even in democratic politics, it has none of the authority in philosophy, where the vocation is precisely to cultivate rigorous engagement with dissent, not foreclose it with proclamations.
If the APA collapses into issuing political declarations, it abandons that vocation. It abandons the norms of philosophical inquiry and takes up the role of a political lobby. That would not strengthen philosophy’s public role; it would dissolve it.
Are you arguing that if philosophers issued political statements that would diminished philosophy’s public role? Or are you arguing that if the APA, as a collective of philosophers, issued public statements that would diminish philosophy’s public role? The former seems false since philosophers have always publicly made forceful and contentious arguments. The latter is unmotivated by any evidence. Academic associations also have a history of making political statements. There is little evidence that this practice is the primary driver of the weakening of the humanities. One might argue that the way that some academic discourse around race and gender was taken up by Democrats weakened the public role of the humanities. But, it’s hardly the sole or primary driver.
Philosophers have always made political arguments, and they should. But that isn’t the issue here. The question is whether the APA, as an institution, ought to do so. Individual philosophers contribute arguments; an association claims to represent the profession as a whole. Conflating the two is a category mistake.
Past practice doesn’t justify the APA’s role; precedent is not argument. What matters is whether proclamations fulfill or distort its vocation. On contested matters they foreclose disagreement rather than illuminate it, trading philosophy’s authority (rigorous engagement with plural views) for the posture of a political lobby. The APA can speak, but should only do so on matters directly (not incidentally) tied to its mission, such as academic freedom. The horrors in Gaza, however grave, are not such a case.
Whether or not this is the primary driver of the humanities’ decline is beside the point. Even marginally, it erodes credibility by collapsing analysis into advocacy. The public already has advocates. What it lacks, and what philosophy uniquely provides, is clarity, critique, and the testing of arguments. Once the APA issues political declarations on contested matters, it ceases to function as a philosophical association and becomes just another lobby.
I am unclear on your view of the relationship between the APA’s actions and the vocation of philosophy, much less the authority of ”
philosophy, insofar as it has any. Furthermore, what do you mean by “philosophy’s authority”? Do you mean the authority of individual philosophers? That will probably stand and fall on their individual contributions. Do you mean the authority of the profession of philosophy? But does the profession of philosophy, as opposed to individual philosophers, have authority with anyone? What evidence is there to believe that the profession of academic philosophy have authority that goes beyond the authority individual philosophers have in light of the quality of their arguments?
Also, why not believe that the relative silence of the APA on this matter might threaten the authority of the profession, at least with respect to professional academics in the other humanities whose associations have issued statements?
Finally, since when did the APA as a professional association engage in philosophical analysis? It is a governing body. It’s not an academic department. It hosts some journals and blogs where individual philosophers post their own thoughts. But, the function of the APA is not to engage in philosophy. Its function is to facilitate individual philosophers’ engagement with philosophy. So, it seems odd to assess the APA on the same metrics as individual philosophers or even philosophy departments. These people and institutions perform rather different activities than does the APA.
Not only are your claims obscure but they are entirely without argument. So, they warrant dismissal.
The argument is straightforward: if the APA collapses into advocacy, it abandons the vocation that gives philosophy its standing. By “philosophy’s authority” I mean its credibility in public life: the expectation that it contributes clarity and argument rather than slogans. That distinction is plain enough, and pretending not to grasp it does not make it obscure. Whether credibility attaches to individuals or the profession as a whole, it is lost the moment the association presumes to speak for all on a contested matter. This is because, as a governing body, the APA does not merely ‘facilitate’ philosophy. When it issues proclamations, it presents itself as the voice of the profession. And once it does that, it is no longer practicing philosophy’s vocation of argument and clarity, but trading it for the posture of advocacy. That is how the authority of philosophy is squandered. To call that point “unclear” is not critique but evasion.
I simultaneously find it unsurprising and mind-boggling that this far-too-late condemnation of Israeli genocide (and, in particular, scholasticide) is deemed controversial by the APA board. From at least October 9, 2023, when then Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant decreed a complete block on the entry of food, water, medicine and fuel to Gaza, through the systematic destruction of all universities, almost the entire health-care system, all agriculture – the list goes on – it’s been evident that we are in the realm here of Nazi-level evil and downright sadism. A recent Ha’aretz article described how the most extensive and expensive engineering project ever undertaken by Israel is its systematic destruction of buildings in Gaza! And yet condemnation is controversial?!!! It’s unsurprising after seeing decades of Western fealty to a framing of Israeli oppression of Palestinians that sees Israel as the “victim”, found throughout the political, media, and academic establishment. But sometimes you have to stand back and recover that sense of being mind-boggled by this situation to keep your sanity and any semblance of a moral compass.
But Joe, the enemy uses human shields and wants to murder everyone (despite heaps of evidence contesting this). So it’s really not so clear that killing children is so bad – after all, are we supposed to let them fire rockets at us as they inevitably will when they’re older?
In the end, the decision will be utterly meaningless. For the past two years, academia has degenerated into a carnival of antisemitic sloganeering, where scenes at Ivy League campuses are scarcely distinguishable from university squares in Germany, circa 1938. And yet some still pretend that condemning Israel is some rare, heroic stance that bold philosophers must bravely defend. As if parroting the loudest mob were an act of courage. These same voices will, in two decades’ time, wax nostalgic about the glory of their sit-ins, recounting them as if they were moments of moral awakening, rather than cheap performances slotted neatly into the tired oppressor–oppressed script. It is not conviction, it is theater. A hollow parade of virtue, staged for applause. So by all means, sign your petitions. Flaunt your indignation. Strike your pose of resistance. The truth is simple: it costs you nothing, it changes nothing, and in the end—no one cares.
What a great piece of right-wing propaganda. There’s one issue though. I’d think that the new right wing move now that Trump has been elected is to project power and boast of the many students expelled, arrested or even deported for their Pro-Palestine activism. As well as many untenured professors who were let go for the same reasons. Heck, even entire universities are now being ‘punished’ for reasons of failing to ‘combat antisemtism’, so the bit about costing nothing is outdated. Keep up Simon!
It never fails to amaze how swiftly academics collapse into self-pity the moment their unlawful conduct—the campus riots, the occupations, the harassment of Jewish students and faculty—brings even the faintest trace of legal consequence.
Thank the Lord that Trump is here to end antisemtism and any associated unlawful conduct from campuses. I am sure now Jewish students and faculty will feel safer due to the legal consequences his regime has ushered.
To point out a flaw in Simon’s argument is not to “collapse into self-pity”. Geez…
The majority of the campus protests were not unlawful but rather were lawful exercises of free speech, in which, btw, significant numbers of Jewish students participated (as protesters).
Yes, everyone who disagrees with me about Israel/Gaza and wants to say so publicly is simply doing so for applause, and what they do is meaningless. Unlike me, a serious person, who parrots Likud (much better than parroting college students and professors!), and writes very meaningful posts on a philosophy blog in which I compare US campus anti-war protests (whose participants have been punished by university administrations and the US government) to the rise of Nazism.
Simon doing sephiroth posting on main.
I think this is a reasonable position to take iff the Ukraine statement is redacted / otherwise distanced.
I don’t see how it is consistent with this decision that the APA say what they said (without a vote) about Ukraine and Russia.
Please, can we stop the personal criticisms? I’m interested in hearing your position on this petition, but I’m not interested in hearing your opinion of other posters.
People getting incrementally more fed up with Kalef is just a part of DN culture.
Too true.
QP and JK agreeing about something, on the other hand….
I remember some study a Historian did of philosophers in Germany under the Nazis. I can’t find the original article so I hope someone will help with that. What they found that approximately 1/3 philosophers were pro-Nazi, 1/3 anti-Nazi and 1/3 didn’t have an opinion. I’d like to think that 100 years later philosophers are capable of doing better than that.
100 years later, they were all actually against it all along.
Could it be that they have, and that that explains why they are hesitating to support a movement that accuses the descendants of the worst victims of Nazi atrocities of committing the same crimes the Nazis accused them of committing? I know the west loves to abstract away from the Nazis’ anti-Jewishness, as though the Jews were chosen at random as the Nazis’ number one enemy, but one hopes that philosophers are a little less ahistorical than that.
It may be tragic but it is “thinkable”, as Mamdani Sr argued a quarter of a century ago wrt a different genocide, “when victims become killers”.
It is certainly thinkable, but we should probably be extremely cautious about the accusation given the history of western countries having a low evidentiary bar for accusing Jews of heinous crimes. It’s not absurd to think that, given that westerners have had a history of accusing Jews of committing genocide and eating children on no evidence back when Jews were non-violent, when Jews finally decided to resort to violence and do, consequently, commit war crimes, they would be falsely accused by the west of war crimes far worse than the ones they are actually committing. Indeed, it is what one would predict given the west’s past history of deep bias in their evaluation of the evidence with respect to Jewish wrongdoing. And the fact that many accused Israel of genocide before this war even began further suggests that a low evidentiary bar is being implemented. Further proof of this is that, in Ireland and South Africa’s lawsuit, they are literally trying to change the standard of proof for a genocide conviction. And let me emphasize, because people seem to be prone to misreading me (presumably based on my handle), that my comment above did not suggest that philosophers are being cautious because they recognize that Jews have been victims in the past. I suggested they are being cautious because they recognize the west’s 2000 year history of false accusation and recognize that the conditions that allowed for this might persist even to this day, unthinkable though that might be.
Putting aside everything else going on in this comment, there’s this core slip: it’s Zionism that is the subject of this discussion, not Judaism. As all the anti-Zionist Jews who are against the genocide would also tell you.
Again relevant, from Mamdani: “every state form generates political identities”.
I’m not a Zionist and reject the equation of criticisms of Israel or Zionism with anti-Semitism. But, hand on my heart, I sincerely thought you were talking about Jews, not Zionists, in the comment Zionist was replying to. You applied a quote about victims becoming the killers to the Nazi Holocaust; since Jews (among others, of course) were the victims of this Holocaust, it seems to follow that you’re saying Jews have become killers. Zionists qua Zionists weren’t the victims of the Holocaust, so they’re not the killers, per your quote?
I might have been further encouraged in this interpretation by others in this thread explicitly defending these kinds of views about international Jewry.
Do I misunderstand your use of that Mamdani quote?
Yeah, I just reject the premise that, if you critique a large subset of a group rather than the larger group itself, it follows that your critique can’t be being informed or influenced by biases towards the larger group. And I suspect so too do other philosophers who are uncomfortable with accusations of genocide leveled at Zionists. Indeed, many white supremacists are careful to qualify their critiques as applying only to a subset of Jews: the Jewish banker class, for instance. I still strongly suspect that their critiques are informed by the broader anti semitic culture they grew up in. That doesn’t seem like an absurd hypothesis. So it wasn’t a slip or an equation of anti semitism with anti-Zionism. Again, try to apply charity to my comments rather than fit them into your pre-existing expectations based on my handle. Many of the accusations leveled at Jews throughout history were only leveled at a subset of Jews, but I doubt you would have had qualms if I had described those accusations as fitting into the broader pattern of leveling false accusations at Jews.
Habibi,
I’m not gonna fall into this trap.
I hope you can figure it out on our own.
Good luck.