Palestine and False Appeals to Complexity

In the wake of recent attacks on Gaza and East Jerusalem, there has been ample discussion of what is to be done.  To make my position clear, Israel is an apartheid state and ending the occupation of Palestinian lands and subjugation of Palestinian people is a clear moral imperative.  Those that disagree have trotted out the usual arguments about why that should not happen.  Of such arguments, the one that I find to be not necessarily the worst but perhaps the most irksome is that the situation is too "complex" to be able to prescribe simple-sounding solutions.  I've seen this logic deployed in myriad ways, ranging from patronizing dismissals of genuine concern for Palestinians to veritable pop quizzes like the one below (apologies for the incompleteness as I was only able to grab two screenshots before she locked her account):

To be clear, this appeal to complexity is not exclusive to the domain of weird tweet threads.  It also shows up in influential publications such as The Atlantic.  The linked op-ed is foolhardy in a number of dimensions, but the load-bearing argument is the same thing we've seen before, with an extra dash of condescension to drive the point home:

"Western observers are often tempted to see foreign countries as mirrors of their own, because it makes a story more compelling for members of their audience, who are interested—who isn’t?—mainly in themselves. And it means they can analyze other societies without going to the considerable trouble of studying them, learning their language, or even visiting. So Narendra Modi of India is Donald Trump, and France’s problem is racial inequality, and Dutch conservatives are Republicans. It’s seductive to think that everything you need to know you learned back in Berkeley.

But believing that foreign countries operate according to American logic is a recipe for confusion, even disaster. Many Americans looking at Iraq in the early years of this century, for example, saw a democracy-in-waiting stymied only by a cruel dictator. America then took steps that resulted, directly and indirectly, in hundreds of thousands of deaths, including those of more than 4,500 American soldiers, with little to show for it. The world is not a mirror. The world is a kaleidoscope that can be understood only by people who are experts in each individual shard, and even then only partially."

So what exactly is wrong with this argument?  The obvious answer is that appealing to complexity without specifically saying what the complexity means to the situation is inherently dishonest.  It's the equivalent of saying that Brawndo has electrolytes over and over until you starve to death because you didn't put water on the crops.  But more importantly, invoking complexity generally serves as a misdirection of sorts, obfuscating righteous anger over ongoing atrocities with academic discussion of increasingly irrelevant historical facts.  My favorite podcast to cite (aptly named Citations Needed) addressed this in a recent episode.  The passage below summarizes their refutation of this talking point (emphasis mine):

"It’s the way of reducing the occupation to some sort of sectarian conflict that has been around for thousands of years and it’s fundamentally a Zionist talking point to be honest, it’s a pro-Israel talking point because it mystifies it, it shrouds it in kind of antiquity and as if these tribes, this is the way a lot of the unrest was framed, not as a colonized or occupied people fighting back against colonizers and then being subject to ethnic or sectarian violence in return, it’s framed as purely sort of sectarian violence, that kind of boil, that tensions boil over, it kind of emerges out of nowhere, without any historical or political antecedents and the idea that it’s complex is just not true. It’s really not complex, it’s actually very simple, and, you know, a lot of things in life are complex, right? Brain surgery is complex. I assume sending a rocket to Mars is complex, I don’t know the details, but sounds complex to me, right? This is not a complex situation, this is actually extremely simple and if you don’t even believe that, then at the very least acknowledge that the side responsible for 95, 96 percent of civilian casualties is the side that your government, as an American, and if you’re European, almost certainly through diplomatic support, backs and supports, to the tune of $3.8 billion year, whereas the other side, you have no, you can’t impact. [...] But we have some say and some control over the government that we fund and ostensibly who operates in our name, and at the very least, even if you don’t acknowledge the fact that this is not some mystical, ancient, sectarian conflict, but is in fact an ongoing settler colonial project and a form of, at the very least, we can all agree, is a military occupation of the vast majority of Palestinians, then that’s it. That’s all you really sort of need to understand. This is not brain surgery. This is not very complex at all."

This is very good, but it's not quite the ideal counterargument.  The factual history of Israel and Palestine literally is complex and denying that, even implicitly, does the cause no favors.  It's far better to acknowledge that while everything that has led to this moment is indeed complicated, discerning a clear answer to the moral question at hand is anything but.  Peter Beinart echoed this thought effortlessly in the latest edition of his newsletter (emphasis mine again):

"And so, in recent days, critics of “wokeness” have produced a flurry of columns arguing that the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians differs from the conflict between white and Black Americans. That’s true. The critics argue that using an American racial lens to understand Israel-Palestine thus simplifies a complex struggle. That’s also true. But so what? Analogies are, by their nature, comparisons between different things. The test of an analogy’s usefulness isn’t whether the two things it compares are the same; it’s whether they are the same in some fundamental way. And the plight of Palestinians and Black Americans is the same in a fundamental way: Both groups live under the control of a state that denies them equal rights. That’s the core insight that the anti-wokeness crowd wants to obscure"

This distinction takes on ever further importance once you consider the implications towards building solidarity and taking action.  Concluding that something is complex may ring true, but it's also banal and appeals primarily to academic concerns and can lead even those who are knowledgeable and passionate about the subject to fall victim to self-doubt and indecision.  But if you instead ground the issue as fundamentally the story of an oppressed people, and relate their struggle to ones that may be more familiar, you can animate yourself and others to act on their behalf.  Don't take it from me, take it from Angela Davis in her book on the subject:

"One of the things I've been thinking about in relation to the need to diversify movements in solidarity with Palestine is that, the tendency is to approach issues about which one is passionate within a narrow framework. People do this whatever their concerns are. But especially with the Palestine solidarity movement. My experience has been that many people assume that in order to be involved with Palestine, you have to be an expert. 

So people are afraid to join because they say, "I don't understand. It's so complicated." Then they hear someone who is truly an expert, who does indeed represent the movement, who is so thoroughly informed about the history of the conflict, who speaks about the failure of the Oslo Accords, et cetera, when this happened and why it's important, but too often people feel that they are not sufficiently informed to consider themselves an advocate of justice in Palestine. The question is how to create windows and doors for people who believe in justice to enter and join the Palestine solidarity movement. 

So that the question of how to bring movements together is also a question of the kind of language one uses and the consciousness one tries to impart. I think it's important to insist on the intersectionality of movements. In the abolition movement, we've been trying to find ways to talk about Palestine so that people who are attracted to a campaign to dismantle prisons in the US will also think about the need to end the occupation in Palestine. It can't be an afterthought. It has to be a part of the ongoing analysis." 

Given all this, it's clear that ignoring false appeals to complexity and centering the argument around firm moral commitments is key to supporting the Palestinian people.  If you don't yet support Palestinian liberation or aren't sure what to think, it can't hurt to talk to someone who does or to learn more for yourself.  And if you already agree with me, then the time for principled advocacy and action is now.