It’s Okay to Stop Talking About the War

Among some fellow Israel supporters, strident online advocacy for the Jewish state is becoming an all-consuming, psychologically unsustainable obsession. Sometimes, the wiser course is to disengage.

On March 15, 2019, a 28-year-old Australian bigot named Brenton Tarrant killed 51 Muslim worshippers at the Al Noor Mosque and Linwood Islamic Centre in Christchurch, New Zealand. It was a shocking hate crime, not just because of the scale of the massacre, but because the perpetrator live-streamed the first shootings on Facebook.

In the aftermath of that attack, some of my friends took to social media, where they not only denounced the killer and his crimes, but also confessed metaphorical complicity in the attack. Every white person, they argued, was a co-conspirator, insofar as he or she benefited from (as the jargon goes) systems of white supremacy. Followers were asked to use the comments section to recite their own confessions, and to pledge that they’d purge their white souls of racism and Islamophobia. Anticipating the Manichean anti-racism logic of Ibram X. Kendi, we were instructed that silence was not an acceptable option, as it served to tacitly abet the forces of white supremacy.

I remember being dumbfounded by this. Tarrant struck me as a despicable piece of work—a walking, talking advertisement for the death penalty. (Indeed, I was disappointed to learn that he’d been taken alive, and so hadn’t suffered the same fate as his victims.) But New Zealand is on the other side of the planet. And the fact that my skin colour happened to (roughly) match that of an Islamophobic sadist didn’t strike me as especially significant.

I also resented the cynical-seeming manner by which progressives were leveraging the emotional power of this crime to advance a dubious ideological claim about the nature of western societies. I’m not a white supremacist. I don’t even know any white supremacists. In my native Canada, as in New Zealand and Australia, white supremacy is regularly denounced as a loathsome political creed. We share this world with eight-billion people. On any given day, some small fraction of them will commit unspeakable crimes. I’m not going to show up for social-media vespers every time it turns out that one of them is white.

I made the mistake of reciting all of these heresies in the comments section of a progressive friend’s self-lacerating Facebook post—a lone voice of dissent embedded within a catalogue of white self-denunciation. That foray went exactly as you might expect—which is to say very badly. And having learned my lesson, I’ve done my best to avoid getting into similar Facebook arguments when progressive social panics subsequently flared up over George Floyd, Indigenous graves, the Ottawa convoy, COVID masking, and a dozen other subjects. It’s one thing to get into it with strangers on Twitter. But when dealing with friends and relatives on Facebook, the interpersonal stakes are higher. So I just roll my eyes and keep scrolling.

I’m guessing that everyone reading this has engaged in, or at least witnessed, some kind of similar social-media drama, whereby long-time friends stopped talking to each other over some pointless online dispute. In some cases, the topic of schism is predictable—Donald Trump, take a bow—while in others, it traces to some obscure personal dispute. We all get triggered by different things. In my case, I’ve noticed, the triggering tends to occur when some moral test is assigned, whereby I’m instructed to confess something, use a particular hashtag, follow (or not follow) a particular set of social media accounts, or otherwise make a public accounting of my views. Even when I agree with the underlying sentiment—the Christchurch shootings were monstrous, and white supremacy is evil—I recoil at the insistence that I must display my agreement in some approved, ritualized way. It seems hectoring and even cultish.

I’m saying all this now because we’re living through an odd cultural moment: Due to the extraordinary savagery of the October 7 Hamas terrorist attacks, it’s now progressives whose public pronouncements, on social media and otherwise, are being closely scrutinized. In some cases, this scrutiny has revealed truly outrageous examples of scholars, journalists, and activists excusing—or even celebrating—Hamas’ attacks. One also hears a lot of euphemism-suffused slogans that serve to justify Palestinian “resistance” (without explicitly mentioning October 7), while casting Israeli military action as “genocidal.” Which is to say: pro-Hamas propaganda under a thin veneer of anti-colonial jargon.

I find this kind of rhetoric maddeningly specious—doubly so when it’s served up on Facebook by those I know and otherwise respect. There’s a temptation to not only confront and denounce this kind of Hamas apologism, but also to go further by demanding pro-Israel attestations from our peers; much in the tradition of the Christchurch confessions I described above. (I’m not going to provide examples here, because the ones I have at hand are all plucked from personal observation on my own socials. And my intention isn’t to embarrass anyone or strain friendships. Just the opposite.)

Not every conservative supports Israel and not everyone who supports Israel is conservative. The overlap between the two groups is substantial, however. And from what I can tell, some conservatives are enjoying (if that’s the right word) this rare chance to police progressive speech, instead of vice versa. Various anti-Israel extremists are even claiming that they’re now the victim of a new form of cancel culture—even if there’s a big difference between losing your job for, say, misgendering someone or criticizing Black Lives Matter; and losing your job for publicly praising the greatest single act of antisemitic mass murder since the Holocaust.

But while I have no problem calling out antisemites, it’s quite another thing to go further and demand that those around us express solidarity with Israel. That gets us into the domain of compelled speech, or even “virtue signaling.” I wouldn’t be particularly happy about my neighbour flying a Hamas flag. But that doesn’t mean he needs to fly the Magen David. As noted above, the demand that one choose sides in the Middle East sounds a lot like Kendi’s insistence that we all need to adopt the posture of anti-racist warrior, as “there’s no such thing as a ‘not racist’ or ‘race neutral’ policy.”

It should be acceptable for friends, colleagues, and relatives to freely admit that they have no strong opinions whatsoever about the ongoing conflict in Gaza—or to concede that they haven’t even kept up with the news. Some friends have admitted to me that they’re actually quite tired of hearing news from this small corner of the world. Saying that should be okay, too.

Most of my readers, if they’re being honest, will admit that they’ve stopped closely following the war news from Ukraine. And how many of us can properly estimate, even roughly, the number of people who’ve died in recent civil conflicts in Yemen or Libya? The world is full of pressing concerns and fresh tragedies, and it’s natural that those who have no special personal, religious, or ethnic connection to the Israel-Hamas conflict will eventually let their attention wander. That doesn’t make them bad people, let alone antisemites.

In recent weeks, a number of Canadian universities have published statements about events in the Middle East. In a few cases, this has been necessary to clear the air after some student group or other put out its own grotesque statement praising Hamas. But for the most part, it’s all seemed rather pointless. The language tends to be stale and lawyerly, having been repeatedly raked over by armies of administrators and communications staffers; the words carefully chosen so as to ensure that no one has any clear basis for complaint. In no cases have these statements offered the world fresh ideas, or won the institutions new friends or supporters. It’s not even clear why these statements are published except so that the authors will have something to say to those who criticized them for having remained mute.

But I’ve become convinced that remaining mute isn’t always such a bad thing. Does the world really need to know what the administrators of every Canadian public-service union and art college think about a war that’s happening more than half a dozen time zones away?

Like most Jews, I found news of the October 7 terrorist attacks to be extremely upsetting. I publicly expressed my solidarity with Israelis, as well as my support for the war effort against Hamas. I’ve also expressed my alarm at the way casual antisemitism has been normalized among many ultra-progressive Canadians such as Shree Paradkar of the Toronto Star, and Ontario politician Matthew Green.

But I’ve generally avoided talking about these issues with friends because I’m haunted by the fear that some of them will express an opinion that I’ll find ghoulish and offensive, which will in turn lead us into an argument that destroys our relationship. (And, to be fair, they may be harbouring similar fears, because they can’t understand why anyone would countenance acts of Israeli military retribution that have claimed the lives of Palestinian civilians.) What would be the point of this kind of exchange? Is there anyone, anywhere, who’s changed their opinion about Israel’s rights and wrongs because they got yelled at on Facebook?

In the fullness of time, this war will be over, and we can all talk about things that unite us. Life is a lonely affair when you surround yourself only with those who share your beliefs, even on important issues such as this one. Except in extreme cases, I’m not going to socially excommunicate people I care about because we disagree on geopolitics.

I know a fair number of Israel supporters here in Canada who now spend pretty much every waking moment scouring social media for people to argue with and misinformation to debunk—an unwinnable struggle that renews itself every day. In at least three cases I know of, this process seems to have devolved into a psychologically damaging form of monomania. (One of these individuals was literally institutionalized for several days.) Where appropriate, I have tried to gently remind these like-minded souls that social-media manifestos can only accomplish so much; and that, for the sake of their own mental health, a spirit of solidarity with Israelis might usefully leavened by a sense of gratitude that we live in a safe and peaceful part of the world. Perhaps take a moment to hug the people you love instead of screaming at the people you hate.

As I write this, Israeli military forces are advancing block by block through the outskirts of Gaza City, part of a complex and dangerous process that will likely result in the destruction of Hamas’ military and political power in the northern, most densely populated part of the Gaza Strip. My hope is that Israel sees the job through, because failing to do so will only guarantee more bloodshed in the future. But I know that even if that hope is realized, it will be a months-long haul—too long for us all to remain locked in a perpetual state of furious political agitation. Our brains simply aren’t designed to be in full-on freakout mode every second of every day. Eventually, we start to crack.

I’ll bring this back to a lesson I usually direct at doctrinaire progressives: Ideological pluralism is the natural order of things. And the world will keep spinning on its axis even if there are people out there who disagree with you. In the face of that disagreement, dialogue is sometimes warranted and fruitful. But in other cases—and I’d say that this is one of them—the best course of action is often to hold one’s tongue, shut off one’s phone, and enjoy those blessings of life that have been denied to thousands of men, women, and children in the Muddle East.