“the notion that Palestinian voices are silenced – a claim I hear frequently on campus – is an inversion of reality”
“All we ever talk about are Palestinian grievances …. That Americans still mostly support Israel and vote for pro-Israel politicians does not mean that Palestinian voices are silenced, people simply don’t agree that Israel is the demon it’s portrayed to be.”
I don’t interact much with other accounts on Twitter very much, in fact, almost never. I don’t have a lot of followers, and I mostly use Twitter as my news feed, to share LI posts, and to RT things.
So it was a rarity for me to respond to a thread by someone I’ve known through interacting on Twitter. The person is a free speech lawyer and also was active against Covid lockdowns. It doesn’t matter who it is for the purpose of this blog post, so I’m not naming or linking.
I knew she was partially Palestinian from her name and a small number of family facts she has tweeted. She’s never been political on Twitter about the Middle East.
Here’s what she tweeted:
One reason I’m a fierce defender of free speech is that I, the daughter of a Palestinian, grew up witnessing the silencing of criticism of Israel through false allegations of anti-semitism. 1/
I’ve remained silent for far too long b/c I, too, am terrified of being the recipient of such charges. I’m afraid of losing my job, harming my professional reputation, losing friends, and incurring wrath on this platform. But I have had enough. 2/
I know that when I’m breathing my last breath, I won’t forgive myself for remaining silent out of cowardice. What job is worth having, & what friends are worth having, that require remaining silent in the face of crimes against humanity, including against one’s own relatives? 3/
Israel has been able to control this narrative for decades by ensuring people like me won’t speak the truth about our family’s experiences or betray our own opinions because we are afraid. I’m deeply ashamed at how many times I’ve failed to speak up in the past few months 4/
Most Americans have zero concept of the heinous treatment to which Palestinians have been subject for decades, culminating in this atrocity. And that’s because of the successful silencing of Palestinians & Palestinian Americans. I won’t play along anymore. 5/5
I responded because she’s a credible person asserting an incredible but very common claim that Palestinian voices are silenced. Just the opposite is true. “Palestinian voices” dominate almost everything, and every other suffering ethnic or religious group needs to step aside so everybody can talk about Palestinian grievances.
Here was my response:
I wish you well and hope you speak your mind without retribution, but the notion that Palestinian voices are silenced – a claim I hear frequently on campus – is an inversion of reality.
On campuses, including @Cornell, there are few openly pro-Israel faculty left because for a generation having anything Zionist or pro-Israel on your CV made getting hired almost impossible in the humanities and social sciences. Pro-Israel faculty are aging out, and the younger faculty who are active on the issue are radically anti-Israel, and they use their power to make Palestinian voices heard. Hardly a week goes by without a clearly anti-Israel event sponsored by faculty departments, yet I can’t recall a single clearly pro-Israel event that had departmental sponsorship, the best we can hope for is something that’s not a complete anti-Israel hatefest.
All we ever talk about are Palestinian grievances, usually coupled with false and malicious charges that Israeli Jews are white colonizers and that having a majority Jewish state is an ‘ethnostate’ and apartheid, charges never made against majority Muslim states that incorporate to varying degrees Islam into their laws.
Almost the entirety of the U.N. and its agencies, and the representative governments, are devoted to demonizing and delegitimizing Israel and elevating Palestinian voices. Major ‘human rights’ organizations like Amnesty and HRW have been coopted into attacking Israel. The most heinous accusations regularly are made against Israel without disruption of speakers or events, yet pro-Israel events and speakers need extensive security and even then regularly are disrupted. I’ve yet to see a pro-Palestinian speaker shouted down.
Good luck getting a job in journalism if you are pro-Israel. Increasingly high tech also is hostile, as leaked chats have revealed.
The Democratic Socialists, BLM, and a host of other leftwing political groups and unions, have endorsed the boycott of Israel, as have several faculty professional groups. The academic boycott of Israel silences Israeli scholars and American scholars and students who want to interact with Israelis.
That Americans still mostly support Israel and vote for pro-Israel politicians does not mean that Palestinian voices are silenced, people simply don’t agree that Israel is the demon it’s portrayed to be.
I agree that the accusation of antisemitism has been overused, but so have false and overly broad accusations of racism, something which has been a Democrat political cudgel against Republicans and conservatives for decades. Groups like CAIR have weaponized false accusations of Islamophobia to silience criticism of even the most extreme Islamist groups very effectively.
There are two sides to this coin.
Again, good luck.
Here are some other responses:
From Jordan Schachtel: “The idea that you can’t be critical of Israel is absurd. Israel is the most criticized nation in the world. The Palestinian movement is led by jihadist terrorists, supported by a majority of Palestinians. If they won’t hold their leaders accountable, nothing will change.”
From the account Wasted Thoughts: “I respect your stalwart defense of free speech. I vehemently disagree with your claim that false allegations of antisemitism silence criticism of Israel. Publicly criticizing Israel is not rare or brave. Israel is by far the world’s most criticized nation, mostly unfairly so.”
[Featured Image: Berkeley City Council Meeting]
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Comments
“,losing friends, and incurring wrath on this platform”
They were never her friends, She needs to understand that.
The Palestinian is lying. She has not lost friends through speaking out for Palestine.
She is not afraid of speaking out. Every time they speak out against Israel, they are applauded.
But she wants to generate a façade of being oppressed –because the truth,– that she’s advocating on behalf of genocidal zealots is not a thing that garners support.
All this is a predictable continuation of the blood feud between descendants of Ishmael and Isaac. Mohammad’s book can be sub-titled ” Death to Jews.” I’ll simply reiterate ‘Islam is a cancer in the West.’
In the Middle East, Arabs have clashed with Jews throughout their history. Why would you think that importing them into America would mean they would behave differently?
Our ancestors knew this fact very well, but us inclusive 21st century folk ignorantly believe our magic American dirt will sooth this centuries old blood feud.
Personally, I would not mind being a Zionist 🙂 Jews have the right to use whatever level of force they decide is necessary.
This woman’s post is the first active step towards a path that has a very bad ending. IMO what she is doing is conflating the Effectiveness of Palestinian voices in terms of achieving their desired political outcomes with being silenced. That’s potentially very troubling b/c the next logical inference is ‘well, we tried to persuade using our voices but it didn’t work b/c we were silenced’. Presumably ‘silenced’ means shut out of political decision-making, just plain ignored or worse deliberately suppressed.
If some group decides that their voices are ignored or worse deliberately suppressed instead of fully heard but simply rejected by the majority they lose interest in trying to maintain a dialogue or include politics by traditional means of persuasion and consensus building. It isn’t the message or the policy goal that’s the problem in their view, nope, their message isn’t even being heard in their view. This is where things go off the rails as they convince themselves that the only effective path forward is more direct action to force folks to pay attention to them, their message and their policy goals.
Not only that but it feeds into that whole “Jews control the world” garbage that makes it very convenient for them to not only gloss over pogroms and the Holocaust, but to justify them as legitimate actions against “oppressors”. Antisemitism accusations aren’t overused, they are underused for fear of offending people.
Very well written. Thank you!
Thanks.
Yes, indeed… 🙂
They are not interested in negotiating, they just want to exterminate Jews. That leaves no choice.
If Palestinian voices are being “silenced”, why are there always articles about anti-Israeli protests? Sounds like a lot of hypocritical one sided nonsense to me…
Almost everything that is said by anyone in this administration on any subject is an “inversion of reality”, including routinely accusing Trump of doing what they themselves are doing.
No it hasn’t, it’s been underused. Too many advocates for Israel bend over backwards to acknowledge that it is possible to be anti-zionist without being antisemitic. In principle this is true, but in practice it really isn’t. Only a tiny percentage of anti-zionists are not motivated by antisemitism.
More to the point, it is not possible to support the “Palestinian” cause without being antisemitic. Every non-antisemitic reason to oppose zionism ought to make one oppose the “Palestinians” even more. Thus every supporter of the “Palestinian struggle” against Israel is either consciously antisemitic or so uninformed that they were able to be duped into supporting antisemitism.
I think the more important distinction is between speech that is critical of Israel or Israeli policies v truly antisemitic speech. By this I mean we should evaluate the particular argument or criticism of Israel being leveled and the history of the speaker. IOW, occasional criticism of Israel isn’t equivalent to antisemitism but constant criticism probably is. There is overlap but it isn’t 100%.
Where I agree is that those who are prone to constantly criticize Israeli policy with never a positive word for Israel almost certainly harbor antisemitic views. As is the case for those who unreservedly support the ‘Palestinian cause’.
Criticism of specific policies or actions of the Israeli government is no more anti-Israeli (let alone antisemitic) than criticism of specific policies or actions of the USA government is anti-American. Indeed I am highly critical of the Israeli government, and of many Israeli laws and policies. I think the country needs major reform.
But what we are talking about here is not criticism of any specific Israeli policy or action, but of Israel itself, of its very existence. That’s what anti-zionism means. Zionism is the idea that Israel ought to exist; anti-zionism is the idea that it ought not to.
(There are anti-zionists who say that Israel should never have been founded in the first place, but now that it has been it must be defended; in practice they are indistinguishable from zionists, and for the purpose of the present discussion I am counting them that way.)
Agreed. In many ways the folks who always rush to claim ‘antisemitism’ when anyone is critical of Israel make the same sort of false claims as those who yell ‘pro Russia’ at anyone critical of Ukraine and/or NATO/USA actions to provoke or prolong the fighting.
Now I’m confused. My whole point in my original comment is that there aren’t any people who “rush to claim ‘antisemitism’ when anyone is critical of Israel”, because when people are critical of Israel (as opposed to some specific action or policy) it almost always is antisemitism, and ought to be called out as such without quibbling, and yet so many (including Prof J) bend over backwards not to do so.
Now there are people who do rush to claim ‘antisemitism’ where it isn’t in evidence, but they don’t do so with criticism of Israel so much as with incidents whose targets happen to be Jewish. For instance every time a Jew is a victim of a crime, there are those who immediately play the antisemitism card, just as every time a black person is a victim of a crime there are those who immediately play the race card. Most of the time neither is correct. Most crimes targeting Jews or black people have nothing to do with any kind of hatred, and are no different from the crimes that happen to target other people.
But criticism of Israel’s existence, or its right to defend itself, is in practice always motivated by antisemitism.
There is a.similar strain of black/white binary sort of jingoism in the Russia/Ukraine conflict.
Just as some (incorrectly) ascribe antisemitism to those who are critical of a particular Israeli action or a particular Israeli govt policy a similar thing occurs when one is critical of Ukraine or Western govt policies in support of Ukraine. Those who make such criticisms are often (incorrectly) labeled as ‘Putin supporters’ or supporting the Russian Govt.
Hundreds of thousands of Muslims killed in Syria and Western Muslim voices seem to be silenced.
Or just silent?
Palestinians are afraid to advocate for their positions like vegans like to keep their diets secret.
It’s the old joke. “An atheist, a vegan, and a Hamas supporter walk into a bar. How does everyone know? Don’t worry, they’ll tell you.”
Everybody’s claiming to be the biggest victim loudly. The low-IQ part of each population.
I’d like to hear about which population is the most useful and productive.
Just visit a DC Gulag.
The so called “Pro- Palestinian” groups are definitely not silenced. They make every unrelated cause about them from issues related to Black Americans, Native Americans, Latinos, the hearing impaired, on and on and on. I can recall when the movie Avatar came out they had protest claiming it was all about them. While their is endless criticism of Israel and it’s every single move, there is almost no criticism of Palestinians, who are typically portrayed as hapless, innocent victims with no agency. The Pro Palestinian people at their core believe in some of the most illiberal and anti tolerance notions you can possibly imagine from honor killings, female mutilation, stoning gay people, child marriage, and yet there is no real discussion of this whatsoever. The only thing the leftist coalition has in common right now is their love of violence to achieve their goals and hatred of Jews, other than that they agree really on no other points, and yet that is never really discussed. Yes Palestinian voices are most certainly not silenced, they are amplified and accepted uncritically.
No supporter of Israel attempts to silence legitimate criticism of Israel; what we assert is that that such “criticism” is almost entirely dishonest, unbalanced and made in bad faith — unfairly denying and erasing Israel’s historical roots (roots which pre-date Islam by millennia) and vilifying Israelis’ legitimate and justified defense against/retaliation for unyielding and perpetual Muslim “holy war” belligerence, with zero condemnation or criticism leveled against the Arab Muslim Fakestinians’ total commitment to waging said “holy war.”
Where do you work, and in which professional field, that speaking in favor of the latest Leftist cause will cost you your job, your reputation, and your friends? I’m calling B.S. on this one.
I know!
The Daily Caller!
You get the lollipop today!
If there’s anyone in Europe and America who isn’t sick 0f these grjevances and the corresponding bombings of planes, subways, buses, etc. it’s really hard to comprehend.
“What job is worth having, & what friends are worth having, that require remaining silent in the face of crimes against humanity, including against one’s own relatives?”
About those relatives and crimes against humanity, are any of them Hamas? PLO? Hezbollah? Participants or supporters of the 7 Oct atrocities?
If so, how do you square that in you worldview?
This reminds me of an old maxim that “you are who you hang with”. I’ve always told my 4 children when they were young to “watch who you hang with” and it payed off well, thank God!