Self-Censorship in a Time of War

Food line at the Jabaliya refugee camp in Gaza, March 18, 2024. Source: AP/Mahmoud Essa

My feelings about the Gaza War are not unique to me—they’re not even unusual. Here they are, stated plainly:

Hamas’s actions on October 7, 2023 were monstrous. They slaughtered hundreds and hundreds of innocent people, took hostages, and used the civilian population of Gaza as “human shields,” effectively placing them in the line of fire. Israel had a right to respond to this attack. Nevertheless, killing thousands of noncombatants¹, subjecting hundreds of thousands to injury and starvation, and destroying the homes of millions is too high a cost to pay for the goal of “eliminating” or “eradicating” Hamas, especially since it is not clear whether and how that goal is to be accomplished. It seems likely that the scope of the death and destruction in Gaza will inspire more people in Gaza, the West Bank, and abroad to take up arms against Israel than would have been the case had the response been less catastrophic.

Unconditional support for Israel is weakening in the US, and official recognition of Palestine is growing even stronger in Europe. Israel’s practice of attributing criticism of its conduct in war to overt antisemitism or ignorance is not only inaccurate, it is self-destructive. Concerted efforts to silence criticisms of Israel risk lending the appearance of reality to baseless and dangerous stereotypes about Jewish control of the media. Accusing even relatively milquetoast critics of Israeli government policy of antisemitism risks numbing the public to actual antisemitism where it occurs.

I’ve spoken about the war on past episodes of The Glenn Show. A week after October 7, I said, “The moral clarity to be able to see [Hamas’s] barbarism and terrorism for what it is need not come at the expense of being able to sympathize with the historical disaster which, for many Palestinian Arabs, the creation of the State of Israel has led to.” I said that the military incursion into Gaza had the potential to be a tragedy. I said the fact that a great many Gazans harbor support for Hamas, as bad as that is for Israel, cannot justify indiscriminate killing.

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Earlier this year, I was invited to speak about black-Jewish relations at a synagogue in Palm Beach, Florida. It was a subject I had spoken and written about before. Still, as the date approached, I grew more and more nervous. What was expected of me? Had I asked the event’s organizers, I’m sure they would have said nothing was expected except that I come and give my view on whatever aspect of the topic interested me, answer some questions from the audience, and attend the lovely meals and receptions they had planned.

But the war was on my mind. The mounting death toll in Gaza, the grotesque images, and the terrifying accounts of the refugees weighed heavily on me. We should not conflate the Jewish people and the State of Israel. But from what I knew of the synagogue and the organizers, this was a group of people who would, more likely than not, object to criticism of Israel’s conduct in the war. And indeed, it would be extraordinarily rude to march into a synagogue that was going out of its way to welcome me (not to mention paying me an honorarium) and then say things that I knew would grievously offend the congregation.

Still, this was an urgent matter. For Gazans and Israelis, yes, but also, in a different way, for Americans. US funding for the war is a point of heated conflict, and not only on college campuses. The pro-Palestinian side has its excesses, and some true antisemites are taking advantage of it, but that does not negate, to me, the moral core of the arguments for a ceasefire.

I opted not to raise the subject of the war at all at that synagogue (you can watch my remarks here). But I didn’t avoid the topic only out of politeness. I was afraid of what taking an explicit, full-throated position critical of Israel’s military response would do to my reputation. I was wary that the issue is so charged that I could lose friends over it. And I knew that some readers and viewers of my comments would infer the worst: that I was taking sides against the Jewish state, and so against the Jewish people. These perceived pressures—and some of them are more than merely “perceived”—have led me to approach the topic tentatively, and sometimes even to hold my tongue, whereas I normally have no problem speaking my mind, even when I know my views are unpopular.

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I find myself in this position of self-censorship despite having already effectively aired my thoughts on the Gaza War above and elsewhere. I would like to believe I’ve made myself clear, but I cannot forestall the process of inference that happens whenever a speaker makes a statement about a controversial issue. I’ve theorized the predicament of unpopular speech and the unpopular speaker in my 1994 essay, “Self-Censorship in Public Discourse: A Theory of ‘Political Correctness’ and Related Phenomena.” In that essay, I wrote the following:

To address the subject of “political correctness,” when power and authority within the academic community is being contested by parties on either side of that issue, is to invite scrutiny of one’s arguments by would-be “friends” and “enemies.” Combatants from the left and the right will try to assess whether a writer is “for them” or “against them.” How an essay like this is read and evaluated, what in it is taken seriously and what is dismissed out-of-hand, depends for many readers on where they presume the writer is “coming from”—what they take to be his ulterior motives. This assessment, in turn, is based not simply upon words on the page, but also on whatever else can be learned about the writer’s character and commitments. One way to gain insight into the writer’s values is to measure his treatment of certain sensitive themes against the standard set by others whose values may be known. This process of ad hominem inference inhibits the free exchange of views on the most controversial and divisive issues.

What was true of the “political correctness” debate when I wrote that essay, nearly three decades ago, is true of the Gaza debate now. Whatever I may say about Gaza—whether I say I believe the IDF’s action to be heinous crimes or fully justified defensive measures or something in between—will spur my audience to infer some information that is not explicitly stated about my ostensibly concealed personal beliefs and about my character. The key question for many in my audience becomes: “What kind of person would say something like that?” Thus, if I say, “Israel must go to whatever lengths it deems necessary to defend itself,” some will infer that I hate Palestinians. If I say, “Israel must bear some moral responsibility for the high number of dead noncombatants,” some will infer that I hate Israel and the Jewish people. I can protest, in either case, that the inference is untrue, but such a denial will do little to exonerate me in the eyes of those who see these statements as the acceptable public face of nefarious private beliefs—particularly if some who are known to have nefarious beliefs are making similar statements.

Here’s another adverse inference: that I am a dupe or pawn who doesn’t know his own mind, that I’ve been hoodwinked by the public relations campaign of one side of the conflict. And another: that I seek to curry favor with other supporters of the side I’m defending, while my private beliefs are misaligned with what I say publicly. If my public statements happen to align perfectly with your own, you’ll likely think, “He’s one of us.” You’ll be much more likely to infer that, whatever are the private beliefs I’m withholding, they’re very similar to your own.

We could go on with this private-beliefs-signaling game forever. The list of adverse inferences about someone who publicly addresses a controversial subject is as long as the list of possible audiences. For the fact is that there is no such thing as context-free speech. Standing before a congregation at a synagogue is one context; dining at the home of a close friend whom I know holds staunchly pro-Zionist views is another; writing a Substack post to be read by subscribers to my podcast and newsletter is yet another. Given the realities of digital communication, we must allow that something said in one context will be available to all the others. Tailoring one’s message so that it will be understood by every possible audience in the way the speaker intends would be so complex as to be practically impossible. Thus, mistaken ad hominem inferences are virtually guaranteed.

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I spin out a bit of my theory not to distract from the issue at hand but to explain what I think the issue really is. For in some sense, my views about Gaza are inconsequential. I’m not a politician or a Middle East expert or a military strategist or a professor of international relations. I’m commenting as a reasonably well-informed social critic rather than a specialist. No one with any power to affect the situation in Gaza would ever hire me as an advisor, nor should they. I would say the same thing about many online pundits who have weighed in on the war as though they, after spending a few weeks thinking about it, have managed to dream up the solution to a century-long problem that has stymied literally everyone else.

For those directly enmeshed in this conflict the stakes are enormously high. Understandably, the combatants seek allies wherever they can find them. As a result, the issue for those of us lucky enough to be able to comment from the sidelines rather than to experience the front lines is that the ad-hominem-inferential heat has been turned up. Whatever the nuances of the argument, it seems, anyone talking about the Gaza War gets sorted into the “friend” pile or the “enemy” pile, and the speaker is treated accordingly. There is no third pile.

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Now, in “Self-Censorship in Public Discourse,” I argue that this is our ever-present condition when speaking about any controversial issue in public. But there is a huge difference between being branded, say, an “enemy of high corporate taxes” and an “enemy of the Jewish people.” Plenty of respectable folks have no problem wearing the former label, but no respectable folks would want to wear the latter. In fact, wearing that label ought to exclude you ipso facto from the realm of respectability. We can debate how to tax corporations, but there should be no debate at all about the humanity of the Jews. We’ve seen where that one has led us, over and over, for millennia. This is why adverse ad hominem inferences about any critic of Israel’s conduct in this war—the conclusion that the critic must harbor Jew-hatred, or must sympathize with those who do—can be so damaging.

This is my point, then. I am not an enemy of Israel, but I have problems with what its military is currently doing and with its influence on American foreign policy. I am certainly not an enemy of the Jewish people—I could run down my bona fides on that account, but what would I say? “Some of my best friends are Jewish”? (It’s true, though.) I loathe the antisemites using protests against the Gaza War to gin up hatred for Jews, but I admire the sincere protestors and activists who want to put a stop to the unnecessary bloodshed and an end to the humanitarian crisis. I do not believe Israel is engaged in genocide against the Palestinians, but I fear it has gotten far, far too close to the line.

Having just read the preceding paragraph, some of you, if you were not already decided, have sorted me into one pile or the other. This leaves me to perform a calculation of my own: at what point does the cost of speaking my mind outweigh the benefit of speaking my mind? I've noted that there is no such thing as context-free speech, but my analysis in “Self-Censorship in Public Discourse” also concludes that there is no such thing as truly free speech at all. The first amendment may guarantee us the legal right to say more or less whatever we want, but it doesn’t protect us from the social consequences of that speech. The unpopular speaker may lose his reputation, lose his friends, lose his job, lose any number of things he holds dear as a result. At that Palm Beach synagogue, I performed the calculation and determined the potential costs outweighed the benefits. I kept my mouth shut about Gaza.

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I’ve felt shame about that silence ever since. I let calculation absolve me of what, in truth, I felt was my responsibility as a public thinker. That responsibility is to think out loud—not necessarily to levy judgment or to condemn, but simply to think and to speak and to listen. I find myself holding back, because I am not so sure that my utterly reasonable concerns about Israel’s conduct in the Gaza war won’t pin a label on me that I can’t shake. I’m accustomed to thinking out loud about all manner of controversial issues with much more freedom than I have allowed myself on this topic. But I have come to realize that I need my freedom to think out loud. The stifling that I feel as a result angers me. I’m angry that the cost of speaking my mind about Gaza has gotten so astronomically high that I worry I can’t afford it. Can I afford to be labeled an antisemite, or a dupe of antisemites, no matter how unjust and untrue such a label might be? Very few people can answer that question in the affirmative.

I express this anger not only on my own behalf but on behalf of the health of our already ailing political discourse. Collectively, we all need each other to think out loud as freely as possible, as honestly as we can. In order to conduct our national affairs with integrity, we Americans all need to know what all of us think about our involvement in the deaths of some thirty-thousand people. We do not need to agree with each other—I’m not expecting here to change anyone’s mind about Gaza. Nor do I expect there should be no cost to speaking one’s mind. But that cost must not be allowed to result in the enclosure of thought within the bounds of a punitively enforced silence.

This enforcement, I might add, goes both ways. Smearing every defender of Israel as a genocidaire is as untenable as smearing every critic of Israel as an antisemite. When the heads of large businesses and law firms say they will refuse to hire any protester against the war and when spreadsheets listing alleged “Zionist writers” are being circulated, anyone with a point of view on the issue is being sent a clear message: shut up or else. This ambient implicit threat virtually guarantees that many of those who would speak out will remain silent, and it virtually guarantees that the quality of our public conversation about these matters will remain in its current state, which is quite poor.

There is a reason unpopular opinions are often met with censorious opposition: it’s an efficient way to control the discourse. You can’t silence everyone; but, then, you don’t have to. Destroy the reputations of a few prominent people, and everyone who agrees with them will get the picture and fall into line. Level the ad hominem attack—“He thinks that because he’s antisemitic”—and the substantive issues get drowned out as the unpopular speaker struggles to defend not his ideas or thoughts but his very person. A pall of suspicion falls over him. He’s sorted into one pile or another.

We cannot go on like this. I certainly can’t. Throughout my career as a public intellectual, I’ve made a point of speaking the truth as I see it, and I’ve received plenty of praise for it. But on the few occasions when I’ve spoken at least part of my mind on Gaza, I’ve received pressure to stop talking about it and to recant. To do so would be to upset the relationship that I’ve tried to build with this audience—with all of my audiences in all of their contexts—which is, at its root, one of honesty. It’s a question of character—my character: If I can’t speak honestly about one issue, there is no reason for anyone to trust I’m speaking honestly about anything else. That doesn’t mean I’m right about everything, it simply means that I’m trying as best I can to understand the world as it comes, and to share that tentative understanding with others. That’s the project I’m engaged in here at The Glenn Show. Maybe it will turn out, in retrospect, that I couldn’t afford the social cost of speaking my mind on Gaza. But, at this crucial juncture, I know I can’t afford not to.

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1. The UN recently changed its source for tracking fatalities in Gaza from Hamas’s Gaza Media Organization to Hamas’s Health Ministry. While the total number of Palestinian deaths attributed to the war remained more or less the same (currently more than 36,000), the Health Ministry only offers age and demographic breakdowns of casualties who have been positively identified. This story from the BBC explains the stated reasons for the UN’s change in sources and the demographics at the time of publication.