ESSAY: The students were right
Some notes on Gaza, claims of genocide, how ideas on the edge become mainstream, and the complications of big tents and uncritical welcomes
Wait long enough and the things only students used to say become received wisdom.
We are living through that process again, as once-dismissed and at times criminalized ideas about Israel’s war on Gaza become mainstream.
Not long ago, it was only those on the margins of polite society, those with a surplus of courage or a deficit of things to lose, who called Israel’s campaign a “genocide.”
But this week, two human rights groups within Israel itself joined a growing chorus and said what only students and some brave lawmakers and writers and activists had been saying for some time now: that Israel is committing genocide in the Gaza Strip.
You can now watch the blob of conventional thinking re-forming itself, and reforming itself, shifting shape, pronouncing on What Must Be Said because now it can be said.
Of course, as always, none of the clean-shaven people with nice suits and nice jobs and nice affiliations who are now saying what the students said long ago are giving their moral advance team any credit. We are living through the turning in ideas vividly distilled in and foreshadowed by Omar El Akkad’s shattering book One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This.
The mainstream owes the students (and other lonely voices) gratitude and an apology.
This is, of course, not the first time this process has played out. Once it was fringey to so much as criticize capitalism in America; today, the most mainstream commentators will wax on about runaway inequality and oligarchy. Once it was fringey to oppose the Iraq war; today, even Republicans say it was wrong. Once it was fringey to criticize globalization; today, there is something of a two-party consensus on moving away from the era in which democracies subordinated people’s needs to the exigencies of growing international trade.
There are two distinct questions thrown up by this recurring pattern: Before the turning, how can the mainstream get better at figuring out what it’s going to think by listening to people who, for reasons of youth or experience or philosophy, tend to get there first? And, after the turning, how should the latecomers be welcomed and how should we acknowledge the moral early birds?
On the first, many in the power elite and in the rarified air of the mainstream would do well to remember William Gibson’s words: “The future is already here. It’s just not very evenly distributed.” This is true about technology, but it is also often true of public opinion. What you will soon think is already here; it’s right now concentrated among kids and activists and those who often struggle to find stable employment.
Think back to the turnings of recent decades. One feels like saying to the mainstreamers: You will think people of different races are equal; you will think the gays are harmless; you will think people should marry for love, not caste or tribe or economics; you will think women should be able to work and divorce and even, hear us out, have a bank account. While you wait, maybe listen to the people getting there first. For all of what may be their imperfections and excesses and sloppy words, they may be saying what you need to hear.
The second question is more complicated. It is an eternal one: When activists and others in the vanguard succeed, which is to say persuade the mainstream to adopt what they have been banging on about, how should everyone behave inside this newly enlarged and now super awkward tent?
It’s a dilemma I wrote about in my book The Persuaders. It’s an argument I recently got into with my friend David Sirota, first in a regrettable and extremely online way and then more thoughtfully offline in a warm phone call of rapprochement. And it’s an argument that has flared up on social media as the mainstream wakes up about Gaza.
The Obama staffer-turned-podcaster Tommy Vietor set off a storm with this plea (which echoes what I facilely said to Sirota before our more nuanced conversation):
The pushback was fierce and, frankly, understandable:
“No, genocide deniers should not be allowed to use the movement to rebrand themselves, sorry,” Aamer Rahman wrote.
Ruth Marshall was more unsparing: “Fuck ALL the way off, you complicit fuck. This is you and the fucking pod boyz doing reputation laundering and that is all. You did NOTHING with your platform to prevent this. / You are complicit and you need to APOLOGIZE and then SHUT THE FUCK UP you vile POS.”
A more nuanced discussion did ensue, with some observers making the important point about distinguishing regular latecomers who see the light from power elites who join the bandwagon. As Katie Halper wrote, “I think there’s an important difference between 1) politicians and Bari Weiss types who enabled the genocide and are opportunists covering their asses and 2) regular people who didn’t speak out but now are. The former should be shamed.”
And David Klion made the important point that the promptings of coalition, of welcoming at almost any cost in order to grow the tent and keep out even worse ideas, risks becoming like a bank bailout that sows the next round of recklessness:
“I’m all for expanding the coalition and especially when it comes to regular rank and file voters but do you not acknowledge the moral hazard of just absolving all these complicit institutional leaders, who will then continue to lead Democrats/Jews into the next moral crisis?”
In general, in this debate, I have been more of a “welcomer.” Not because I don’t have a problem with the latecomers and the wars and the tax cuts and the suffering and predation and theft these things enable, but because of the mathematics of politics. You need more people tomorrow than you had yesterday, if you want to fix things. Purity tests are for diamonds, not movements.
But watching the mainstream blob contort recently, I am sympathetic to the critics of coalitionism at any price. It is one thing to welcome converts. It is another for the converts who occupy positions of influence never to acknowledge that others got there first, that they in their perches of power might have participated in shaming what turned out to be their own moral advance team, and that they owe some measure of gratitude to those whose courage or lack of mortgages or basic constitutional makeup allowed them to get there first and see clearly where others didn’t.
Not long ago, I was at a dinner party where two foreign-policy graybeards were dismissing the student protesters against Israel’s war in all the familiar, predictable ways. The kids don’t get it. So exaggerated, so naive, so extreme. No one else around the table seemed bothered, but I couldn’t help but notice that the two men had been instrumental in the Iraq war. And here they were still, emanating eminence. One day, sure enough, they will make their way over to the right side of this story, too. Such migration should be encouraged. But it is worth asking whether a measure of acknowledgement is a fair demand, and whether welcoming no matter what or how keeps the same people and ideas in power until just enough damage is done.
The Ink is powered by readers, not billionaires. Help us stand up for independent media that isn’t afraid to tell the truth by joining us today, or if you’re already part of our community, give a gift or group subscription.
My children (young adults) said this a year ago. Their news sources were live video feeds on the ground in Gaza, while we were still watching mainstream media who, BTW, was paid for by corporate sponsors. They compared it to the students that spoke and protested against Vietnam. Those same students are now baby boomers, many who are have been hoodwinked by corporate led media. Where are our memories? Being against a genocide does not mean anti-Israeli people or anti-Jewish. And those starving babies and children are not Hamas.
Don't you think the antisemitism that did exist as part of the campus protests made it easier to dismiss the correctness of much of what the students were saying? I am a Jew who has been outspoken against the war from the beginning, but I could not defend (and indeed felt threatened by) some of the language coming out of the protests (not the use of the word genocide, but the "all Zionists deserve to die, for example). I have to also say that in my personal experience, the worst antisemitic harassment I experienced was from a fellow adjunct professor at a community college, and it was based on his antiZionism (and happened regardless of the fact that I have never supported the occupation and have worked for Palestinian liberation, but he had no interest in what I actually thought, only in the fact that I'm a Jew). I just find it odd that in an article about language, you skip over some of the language coming out of those protests that made it easier for people to dismiss what they were saying.