just because all your friends said it on ig doesn’t make it true, and it’s irrelevant anyway

Here, I will try to imitate your instagram feed:

genocide genocide genocide genocide genocide genocide genocide

How do you feel? I feel exhausted. I don’t know if it is. You don’t know if it is. Why do you keep yelling this at me?

Whether it is or isn’t genocide — and I am not an international law expert, nor do I have sufficient facts, so I will not presume to determine whether it is or isn’t— is, humbly, besides the point.

The insistence on calling it genocide, and making that a precondition for allyship, is a distraction and a gatekeeper. It is everything that is wrong with the progressive left today in one word. It is its own kind of violence and coercion that silences nuanced and contextualized thought and analysis. It says only that it is, and if you don’t think that it is or you don’t know that it is, then you are against us. It leaves no room for questioning or learning or exploring or coming to a conclusion on the basis of your own inquiry and experience.

This is not to say that it is false, only to say that we should not presume it is true. It might be. I don’t rule it out. I don’t know if it is true or false, but I do know that this is immeasurably tragic.

This insistence on using “genocide”, a technical term with a legal definition, is a distraction, and it is, frankly, irrelevant. News articles, radio broadcasts, and conversations between intimate partners are now subsumed with the is-it-isn’t-it conversation. What are the criteria? What’s the definition? But this side did this and that side did that and if you look at history you’ll see this other time… How is it that all of a sudden we’re all judges at the Hague? Instead let’s talk about what we know, let’s talk about what we feel, let’s talk about how we see a future together. Whether it is or isn’t should change none of these conversations. But these are critical conversations, and we can’t even reach them if we’re stuck arguing over what it is.

The proliferation of this word is a distraction and a disservice. This is a catastrophe and a tragedy, at a massive scale. Its truth is neither minimized nor maximized in any way by the word we call it. It’s some really bad shit. But instead of talking about the catastrophe, about its heartbreak and its scale and its roots and its outcomes, we’re quibbling about whether it does or does not fit into a definition that frankly very few of us are qualified to determine. And so what? So what if it is, or it isn’t? Does it change the way we understand it if we call it “genocide” or not? Can we not grieve sufficiently with a different word, or with no word? Can we not feel fear sufficiently with our own words? Can we not understand it through an emotional lens, one for which we don’t have sufficient words? Can we not just say “this is fucked”, and that be enough?

And we’re judged as people on whether or not we are willing to use this word, as if using the word is a proxy for acknowledging tragedy and feeling grief. Please, don’t make my language a criteria for allyship. We are allies, if you’ll let us be.

It is ineffective and counterproductive to try to force compassion out of people by coercing their language. Instead of feeling the feelings and thinking the thoughts and speaking the words that I have, I now see that I need to think and speak a certain way in order to feel a certain way, and this makes me not want to feel that way, because those words and thoughts aren’t the words and thoughts that I want to use to express my feelings, and I overwhelmingly believe that we should be allowed to use different words and thoughts to express our same and similar feelings, and if you don’t believe this then I do not want to be aligned with you, even if we really are aligned, on the inside.

You are pushing me away, but I want to be embraced.

—

Addendum for the other Passover-celebrants and Passover-curious:

It occurs to me that there is an analogy here with the “Four Children”. On Passover, a small part of the Seder is to recount the midrash (is it a midrash? I actually have no idea) of the four children: wise, wicked, simple, silent (or some variation thereof). Each child asks about the story of Passover in his (gender just borrowed from the liturgy here) own way. For example, the wise one asks an erudite question about laws and customs and receives an erudite answer in kind. The wicked, in some retellings, asks something along the lines of “what are you doing, you big nerds?”. The simple is like “what’s going on” and the silent one (which I always thought was just a baby) obviously says nothing. To each child, we explain Passover in a way that will be meaningful and appropriate for them, yet regardless of the way we retell it we capture the value and importance of the holiday and/or belief in God (depending on your practice).

The analogy thus is this: we each have our own way of receiving and experiencing the world, and we will ask and communicate about those experiences in our own manner. In engaging with each other, we need to meet each other where we each are at, being consistent not necessarily in our words but in our message and our values, in order to bring everyone together. There is no one right way to tell the story of Passover, just like there is no one right way to talk about the atrocities happening in Gaza. Answering the silent child as you would the wise or the wicked ignores — or worse, presumes irrelevant, even alienates — the silent child’s experience with and position in the world. And alienating each other is the last thing we need.