In the milieu of people who care about global justice and human rights, there is a ready defence for the disproportionate obsession with Israel, both in the outsized attention devoted to its sins, real and imagined, and to the passion that attaches to the condemnations of the Jewish state.
“We are complicit” in Israel’s actions, and therefore they demand our righteous condemnation in a way that the actions of other countries fighting wars we might not like do not,” the argument goes.
The least interesting aspect of this is that it is a complete lie. There is certainly no shortage of countries fighting brutal wars or having terrible human rights records that are not aligned with the US or the UK, but there are quite a few that are. Turkey, a Middle Eastern nation state birthed in one of modernity’s largest ethnic cleansings, currently occupies bits of Syria and Cyprus. In the latter it has settled a large population of ethnic Turks in homes and towns formerly belonging to Greek Cypriots. Its record on Kurdish rights or a free press are less than stellar. By the metric of complicity it should be causing far more angst than Israel does, as it is a full member of NATO, integrated into the command structures of the alliances militaries, and a significantly larger trade partner of both the UK and the EU.
Turkey is far from alone, of course. Qatar, the carbon slaveocracy that also functions as an informal apprenticeship programme for British media, is just as close with Western governments, and like Turkey, it is occasionally a target for criticism, but rarely a driver of the kind of obsessional passion that is reserved for Israel.
Much more interesting than the rank dishonesty is the implied norm, and its selective application.
The “Complicity Norm” suggests that every moral actor has a particular burden to condemn and distance him or herself from a crime that can be linked to an actor he might be indirectly supporting or financing, and that this burden is higher than any general moral burden regarding crimes that one might have no link to.
Put simply, we have a larger obligation to speak up when “we are complicit” than when we are not.
The “we” in “we are complicit” is one of the odder pronouns in the English language, as it is syntactically in the first person, while being semantically somewhere in the second or third. The Belgian philosopher Maarten Boudry refers to this as the “self-excluding we”, something he also calls “wijbak,” which I’m reliably told is hilarious in Dutch.
It poses as a form of contrition while acting as a form of supremacy. I might say that we are complicit, but obviously I am no such thing.
The moral supremacy isn’t just in the grammar, though. The claim that complicity pollutes is a claim of heightened sensitivity. The only reason to remind someone that “we are complicit” is because they might not see their own connection to the acts being condemned. Identifying complicity, then, becomes a performance of aroused moral senses. You might only feel complicit about an action you directly commit. That guy over there might feel complicity about something he is indirectly involved in but profits from or endorse. But I’m the only real princess whose moral sensibilities are so delicate that even a pea of wrongdoing under 20 featherbeds is enough to disturb my sleep.
The journalists, activists, and academics so concerned about their complicity in Israel’s actions are remarkably blasé about their complicity in the actions of people they directly support. When it comes to violence against Jews, the people who feel a pea through 20 featherweights can’t be bothered to notice the entire pod they are directly sleeping on.
You may not have heard much about it, because non-Israeli media has (for now, at least) barely covered it, but in recent weeks, there have been long and extensive interviews with former hostages detailing the deliberate starvation, torture, and sexual abuse they endured.
None of it was news, though the first-hand testimonies were shocking. As I watched some of them, I tried to think back if there was anyone in the pro-Palestinian movement who objected to this at all, and specifically on the grounds of complicity. Were there activists signing letters and holding signs that insisting that these acts were “not in my name”? One would think that all the organisations mobilised to ensure that Israel could not decisively win the war in Gaza would feel the need to distance themselves morally from the one tactic that more than any other ensured this would be the case, the taking and holding of hostages. If speaking out against Israel is important for a British taxpayer to do because “we are complicit,” then surely speaking out against the practice of ripping people from their homes on a Saturday morning after murdering their families is important to do when your entire life’s work is to be a partisan for a cause in whose name this was done.
Alas no. A similar lack of complicity sensibility emerges when the topic is antisemitic violence. The murders on Bondi Beach, like the ones before in Manchester and Washington and Boulder (and before that in Brussels, Toulouse, Copenhagen…) were carried out in the name of the Palestinian cause by people who largely agreed with the activist milieu’s “critique” of Israel.
We can quibble about the actual complicity of anti-Israel obsessives in violence against Jews, although by doing so we would depart from the norm in anti-racist circles, where the connection between elite incident and mob violence is always a given – whenever the target isn’t Jews. Enlightened commentary has no problem linking violence against immigrants to right-wing talking points about “grooming”, or violence against Muslims to careless rhetoric about terrorism and jihad, or even reports of assaults on Polish migrants to the Brexit campaign.
But they can’t see it in themselves. For decades, scholars and self-appointed humanitarians have pushed the idea that the Jewish state is uniquely evil, backed by a network of powerful Western and American forces that seek to hide this fact and silence anyone who points it out. For two years, they have falsely accused Israel of committing genocide, while pushing outside the moral public space – and for that matter, outside the physical public space – any Jew who might object to that as a genocide enabler or genocide supporter.
Even without the phoney Complicity Norm, their responsibility for the moral lynch mob and the attendant violence should be a cause for concern. A British academic pushing the genocide libel has a larger marginal impact on a synagogue shooter than on the IDF, regardless of how much she sends to HMRC.
But under the terms of their own Complicity Norm, the anti-Israel activist complex should be doubly accountable. And yet, revealingly, they never protest their own complicity. The sensitive souls troubled by a solitary pea when it lets them stake a “self-excluding we” claim suddenly find that they sleep just fine.
Shany Mor is a lecturer in political thought at Reichman University and a senior research associate at Bicom.
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