After October 7th, it has been a hard time for engaging with understanding, to remain open to multiple truths, to respect the pain and fear on “the other side,” even when “opposing sides” are more constructed than real.
Last week, on Twitter, he posted: “From the very same people who will tell you that last month—in [Israel,] that ‘one place where Jews can be safe’ — Jews suffered the worst attack on Jewish life since the Holocaust. Pick a lane.”
(That’s right. “Pick a lane.” Nice.) (And by the way, I quit Twitter last week, in the wake of Musk going full-anti-Semite. Again.)
Imagining he had found a winning point, he then doubled-down on Facebook:
“A lot of the very same people who say Israel is the only place where Jews can safely live as Jews also say that Israel—and Israeli Jews—is one of the most threatened nations on earth. Which is it?”
That post had already generated 451 likes etc., and 76 shares. Virally exciting, I’m sure. But I was struck by its lack of insight or empathy. Funny how those kinds of posts go viral.
I replied on Facebook (a mistake, I know):
“I don’t know anyone who formulates the point this way. I think this is a constructed strawman argument, an exaggeration to create the appearance of a contradiction where a contradiction does not exist. There is a reasonable and consistent view, common among left and right Zionists:
1) Because Jews face extreme danger from time to time around the world, and other nations have shown that they won’t allow Jewish refugees, Israel is the only place of safety when there is such unfortunately recurring dangers in the world (that’s not the extreme or absolute position you’ve portrayed here).
2) Israel faces a serious security threat.
There is no contradiction between those two positions. And I think both of those observations are true [because we have been reminded since Oct. 7th that Jews are not safe anywhere]. Some people take right-wing positions from those two observations; many take a left-wing position in favor of peace (that’s me — I reach a pro-peace post-Zionist conclusion from those two unfortunate realities). Moreover, I think many people on the left and right feel both of those realities after 10/7 with an even deeper sense of dread and isolation. We feel unsafe in the diaspora at the very same time it feels most unsafe in Israel. Imagine someone [me] feeling that dread. And then reading your post that exaggerates those valid feelings to construct a contradiction [where there is no contradiction at all]. You portray such understandable feelings of isolation as hypocrisy. I think your post goes beyond your usually sharp constructive political commentary (sharp in a good way) to sharp political commentary – sharp in a debater’s manufacturing-of-argument way and also in a sharp-elbows way that others would find hurtful and dismissive. I’ve communicated that to you earlier. Frankly, I’m disappointed to see this post still up in this form. If you won’t delete it, why not add a clarification or a note of acknowledgement?”
In response, he claimed that Israel’s defenders really do formulate the danger in such extreme ways. He quoted another comment on his post as proof. “A lot of people—many of them Israel’s defenders—clicked ‘like’ on his comment. One of those people was you.” That was the entire reply.
At first, I felt embarrassed. Had I too quickly clicked a “like” in the “fog of social media debate”? (“Honey, I’ll be late coming to bed. Someone on the internet is wrong.” Yes, I became that guy.) I tried searching, but by that time, the commenter had deleted his post, so I didn’t have a chance to check what he was talking about. And I realized how I had been pulled into just another silly gotcha gambit. His reply was, more or less, “Gotcha! I found another hypocrisy!” But it was utterly unresponsive to my main point: the lack of empathy.
I replied: “This is non-responsive to the point about how you’re responding to others’ pain by ungenerously portraying it as hypocrisy, unapologetically. And I still don’t see a defense of the contradiction you’ve constructed.”
Other people jumped in, and it went nowhere.
To check whether I was misreading it, I have read the original post to several Jewish friends who, like me, are on the left and support a two-state solution, etc. The reaction to his original post is uniformly and strongly negative. They agree that this kind of gotcha is counterproductive. One friend offered this insightful observation: “It’s like saying ‘I heard you say 3 is more than 2. And then you said 4 is more than 2. Which is it? Pick a lane.”
I’d add: “It’s like saying ‘I heard you say you’re afraid of getting beaten up here. And then you said you’re afraid for people getting murdered or taken hostage there. Which is it? Pick a lane.”
As I was feeling morally superior, I started to reflect on my own social media engagement. I had been looking for people accusing Israel of “genocide.” I would post a short reply: “Please define the term ‘genocide.'”
My point was that people – including lawyers and human rights groups bringing lawsuits – were throwing around a very serious term with very serious legal and political and military consequences without consistency. I thought the definition of genocide required such a high bar of intending and acting to exterminate a people, that the use of the term “genocide” exposed hypocrisy.
But then I realized I was playing the gotcha game lacking empathy. It is hard to stand on my own self-righteous high ground when Israel’s own head of state invoked “Amalek” on the eve of the ground invasion as justification. Here is Netanyahu, Oct. 28th: “You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible. And we do remember.”
For reference, here is 1 Samuel 15, lines 2-3: “Thus says the Lord of hosts: ‘I will punish Amalek for what he did to Israel, how he ambushed him on the way when he came up from Egypt. Now go and attack Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and do not spare them. But kill both man and woman, infant and nursing child, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.’”
And on top of that, there is Smotrich, Ben-Gvir, Eliyahu (Dr. Stange-Eliyahu, suggesting dropping an atomic bomb on Gaza)…
Why am I calling out the hypocrisy of using the word “genocide” when Israel’s government is making the case of a genocidal intent, regardless of what the military is actually doing? Isn’t the evidence of government intent plus the forced migration and humanitarian crisis enough to pause — not only for the facts on the ground, but also for the empathy, the fear that the words plus deeds understandably feel to many like the start of a genocide?
So yes, I started by seeing the hypocrisy of the hypocri-sizers on the other side. But I am feeling like the hypocrite lacking empathy this morning, and I’ll try to be better.
Shugerblog 
I can’t understand your intent, however, I think there is a very important distinction between saying “you seem to be using that word in an ambiguous way please define it” and the accusation of hypocrisy. Indeed, I think the former is absolutely essential *especially* in the case with the genocide argument where the term is often used in a way that exploits the ambiguity between genocide as literally exterminating people and genocide as actions which might result in that culture not being perpetuated because the people are dispersed within other societies. The later might be undesirable but it matters whether you are accusing someone of wanting to kill all Palestinians or to have them all immigrate to the EU/US and be culturally integrated.
For instance, imagine that instead of the implied dunk the, reader had said: the argument for Israel’s existence as a Jewish state seems to depend on the idea that Israel provides a particular degree of safety for Jews not otherwise available. How is this argument consistent with the concern over existential threats faced by Israel (and it’s citizens) itself.
I think there is a reasonable response to this much like what you gave but notice that response forces you to clarify that there are two different kinds of threat at issue and a Jewish state exists to protect against something like a 2nd holocaust by ensuring that Jews always have somewhere to go but doesn’t necessarily protect them against more mundane kinda of violence. That advances the discussion in a valuable way by forcing people to clarify their argument.
Sure, *sometimes* the better move is to try to charitably reconstruct their argument. Often that’s the correct move in academic discourse but thata often not very convincing since it’s always hard to give a good argument for a view you think is mistaken and demanding you always do it effectively shifts the burden of proof to you by demanding you show no argument of that kind could ever be valid.
I’d diagnose the problem here as the reply that focuses on whether they’ve caught you out rather than whether there is some good argument you can make.
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Fair points. I agree – the question is perhaps more about tone of dialogue rather than the “gotcha” approach to expose the other side as illegitimate or biased that I described in the post.
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Maybe the shorter version is: you are 100% correct that there is a problem when our focus is on showing whether someone has committed an intellectual sin. However, it’s good to point to ways in which arguments may conflict with each other or seem to rely on ambiguity but it should always be forward looking — never an attempt to cast blame based on whether you’ve previously said something inconsistent.
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Yes, I think we agree. Thanks!
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