Re: If you support Israel in the middle of a genocide, you’re an awful person

Let's cut to the chase. If you're fretting about antisemitism and the
fears and insecurities of Jewish students in the middle of a genocide,
you're an awful human being.
 https://mondoweiss.net/2024/07/if-you-support-israel-in-the-middle-of-a-genocide-youre-an-awful-person/
 During the worst attack on Gaza before this one, in 2014, Steven
Salaita, a Palestinian professor of American Indian Studies, had a
tenured offer withdrawn by the University of Illinois over some
strongly worded tweets he posted concerning that attack. Soon after, I
published a piece in the New York Times blog The Stone (also see
here), concerning one of those tweets – it said “Let’s cut to the
chase: If you’re defending #Israel right now you’re an awful human
being”(11:46 PM – 8 Jul 2014).
 I wasn’t addressing the obvious violation of academic freedom
represented by his case, nor the appropriateness of his moral outrage
at Israel’s actions – regarding those issues I was totally with him.
Instead, I considered whether I thought the claim in the tweet was, in
fact, true. Were defenders of Israel during this attack indeed “awful
human beings”?
 Let’s set aside the obvious hyperbole of the statement and the fact
that, of course, most people, no matter their deplorable views, cannot
be simply summed up as “awful”; human character is a complicated
affair. What I take to be the point of the claim, however, is that if
someone, after the horrific punishment meted out by Israel on Gaza,
could still defend Israel, then this manifested a serious moral
character flaw.
 Without completely rehearsing my answer to the question ten years ago,
briefly, it went like this. It’s important to distinguish between the
moral status of an action and the moral character of a person. As
applied to the 2014 Israeli attack, I argued that though Israel’s
actions were indeed morally atrocious, people of decent character
could still defend it given the surrounding social and informational
environment in which they lived. Given the nature of Western
(especially American) media, the standard assumptions of people’s
families and friends, etc., it’s quite understandable how good, decent
people might be misled into defending what are, in fact, morally
abominable actions. I then interpreted Salaita’s tweet as both
aspirational and interventionist. I saw it as aspirational in the
sense that it pointed to a world where people were sufficiently
well-informed by the media and their surrounding social environment so
that, in fact, only “an awful human being” would support Israel’s
actions. (The way I put it then was that the tweet wasn’t true, “but
it ought to be”). It was interventionist in the sense that he was
helping us to get to that world by modeling the reaction one ought to
have.
 As I’ve watched Israel’s genocide unfold these past nine months and
seen so many political and media figures either outright defend Israel
or produce so-called “nuanced” criticisms laced with excuses, I’ve had
many occasions to think about Salaita’s tweet. Given the scale of the
current genocidal attack on Gaza, and the abundance of information
available from social media (and even the mainstream media, though
usually one has to ignore the framing), is it now true that only “an
awful human being” would defend Israel? This time, I think the case
for answering in the affirmative is quite strong.
 One might ask at this point whether the question really matters. As I
am not a fan of “clean hands” politics, I don’t think one’s judgments
of moral character normally have clear consequences about how one
should behave politically. If the political calculation warrants it, I
will “hold my nose”, or get my “hands dirty” when required. For
example, though I indeed judge Joe Biden to be “an awful human being”,
I will vote for him to keep a much more awful and much more dangerous
human being from winning the election.
 However, I do think this question of moral character matters a lot in
two arenas: what I’ll call “deliberation in the public sphere” and
local interpersonal relations. By the first, I have in mind the many
controversies we’re now seeing in a large variety of settings over how
to speak about Israel and Gaza. Organizations of every sort — whether
it be government bodies like city councils and school boards, or
non-governmental organizations like schools, universities, sports
associations, online communities, private businesses, etc. — are
dealing with questions about making public statements in the name of
the organization on Gaza and disciplining the kind of speech
concerning Gaza that takes place within the organizational spaces
(e.g. see this story). I mention this arena mainly to set it aside
here (but see this excellent discussion of the issue — and in the
spirit of full disclosure, the author is my daughter). The only point
I want to make here regarding the controversies taking place in these
public spaces over how to address Gaza is that this question of moral
character is playing an important role, if only implicitly. One might
think of it this way: where is the line between the demands of minimal
decency (not being an “awful human being”) and demands that are
clearly political? The case of Gaza 2023-24 is bringing this question
to the fore in unprecedented ways.
 But it’s in the second arena, the realm of local interpersonal
relations, where I have experienced the effects of the Salaita claim
most deeply. Until recently I have been able to separate my political
commitment to Palestinian liberation from my personal relations. There
are many people, a number of them friends, who I knew felt quite
differently from me about Israel/Palestine, and yet toward whom I had
warm and friendly feelings. But now that’s changed — not completely,
but in important, and quite discernible ways. There are now many
people whose company I can no longer unequivocally enjoy, or, in some
cases, even tolerate.
 In particular, I feel very differently about certain Jewish friends,
colleagues, and acquaintances. I’m thinking of people who actively
affirm their Jewish identity as an important part of their lives,
especially those who see Zionism, or some special connection to
Israel, as an important component in their sense of their Jewishness.
As I said above, in the past, I could look past this difference in our
views, but now, after Gaza 2023-24, I can’t any longer. I find that
all of my interactions with these folks are emotionally colored in a
way that prevents me from experiencing the kind of warm fellow-feeling
I used to feel in their company. I include here not only people
“defending Israel” straightforwardly (actually, I pretty much don’t
associate with people who do that), but primarily those who, with much
liberal hand-wringing and consternation, express their sorrow over the
loss of Palestinian life but then pivot to discussing the horrors of
October 7, the difficulty of dealing with terrorism, Israeli-Jewish
feelings of insecurity, and then, what really gets me going, the
worrisome increase in antisemitism.
 I have recently spoken and written about the groundless charge that
the protest movement is infected with antisemitism, charges that are
taken for granted in many spaces (the political and media
establishment, for starters, but also most prominent Jewish
organizations — Jewish Voice for Peace and If Not Now being the
notable exceptions). My writing and speaking about this has been
mostly defensive, in the sense that I rebut the arguments that claim
to show how antisemitic the movement is, especially those that
conflate anti-Zionism with antisemitism. While I think publicly
rebutting these arguments is necessary — and I’m sure, unfortunately,
there will still be a need to do this often in the future — the
politically expedient, perhaps necessary, adoption of this defensive
mode has left me feeling frustrated and inadequate.
 Here, then, is what I want to say to these Jewish friends and
acquaintances who fret about antisemitism, especially those who
perceive attacks on Israel as attacks on their identity. One way of
thinking about Jewish identity is to think of one’s relation to the
rest of the Jewish people as a kind of family relation. A people is
sort of like a very, very large family. Israel, the Jewish state, can
then be thought of as the family project. I think this is how many
Jews do feel about Israel, and it helps to explain their taking
criticism of Israel personally. However, while solidarity with, and
concern for, one’s family members is certainly a crucial part of
identifying with the family, so is taking responsibility for what
one’s family members do. If my children, say, were to engage in
morally atrocious behavior, my greatest concern wouldn’t be how people
reacted to me and my family. My primary concern would be to rectify
the wrong done, to the extent possible. So, in that vein, I ask, is
the very moment the Jewish “family project” is engaging in genocide
the morally appropriate time to worry about negative feelings
expressed about Jews? Wouldn’t a “mensch” devote all of their energy
to putting a stop to the family’s criminal behavior first, allying
with everyone fighting for that goal (as we see JVP and If Not Now
doing), and put aside one’s concerns about how some chants are phrased
and some tropes are expressed? (See this for a particularly good
example of what I’m talking about.)
 In the spirit of the Salaita tweet, then, I will end with this. Anyone
who is fretting about antisemitism, about the fears and insecurities
of Jewish students on campuses, and all the other complaints about
antisemitic tropes that are sometimes carelessly expressed by those
reacting to the horror of Gaza — to them I say, “let’s cut to the
chase; if this is what’s occupying your concerns right now, in the
midst of a genocide being perpetrated by your own people, you’re an
awful human being!”