Living in and with a Regime of Silencing: Narrative Control and Totalitarian Inclinations since October 7, 2023
Image by Howard Horowitz
BY Alisse Waterston
October 2024
The 4th of October 2023 marks the day Nada Khader, the 1987 salutatorian of Horace Greeley High School, began to face exile from her alma mater. Horace Greeley is an elite public school in Chappaqua, New York, home to Bill and Hilary Clinton.
Nada is Palestinian-American, and, since 2001, the Executive Director of WESPAC Foundation, a peace and justice organization founded in 1974 by Connie Hogarth, a celebrated peace activist. WESPAC is an umbrella organization that supports peaceful organizing on a range of issues including environmental justice, racial justice, antiwar, immigration, and policing.
And Palestine.
On that Thursday in October, Nada participated in the Greeley Community Service Expo, an annual school-sponsored activity, bringing with her a poster with a collage of 26 photographs depicting WESPAC’s range of social justice initiatives, just as she had done every year for a decade. Nada had always been welcome at her alma mater. This time was different. Three students claimed to be offended by one among the 26 images—a photo showing demonstrators against Israel’s 2008 bombing of Gaza. They complained to school administrators that Nada and WESPAC’s poster was “antisemitic,” making them feel “unsafe.” The following day, Nada received a letter banning her from all campuses of the Chappaqua Central School District. At a subsequent public Board of Education meeting, the board president labeled the photo on the poster “antisemitic” while making a public announcement of Nada’s exile from school property.
On Saturday the 7th of October, approximately 1000 Hamas fighters broke through Israel’s twenty foot high, forty miles long security wall. On that day of horror, Hamas fighters killed 1200 Israeli citizens, visitors, and soldiers; another 250 were taken captive into Gaza, according to Israeli authorities. Especially hard hit were the southern Kibbutzim of Be'eri, Kfar Aza, and Nir Oz, and young concert goers attending a nearby music festival. The death and devastation were horrific.
Three years prior, after a billion dollar upgrade, the refurbished high tech security wall was boastfully dubbed by Benny Gantz, then Israel’s Defense Minister, as “The Iron Wall.” I can’t help but wonder if Gantz ever heard of or read Rashid Khalidi’s 2006 book, The Iron Cage, a phrase he invokes as metaphor and as physical reality of the fencing in of Palestinians in “open-air prisons” (Khalidi 2006: ix-x).
On Sunday, the 8th of October, Israel began its retaliatory assault on Gaza claiming its “right to defend itself,” an assault that has descended into genocide according to the South African case against Israel submitted to the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the Court’s finding (genocide is plausible), the findings of crimes against humanity and war crimes by the International Criminal Court (ICC) and findings of the UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Territories. As of mid-September (2024), the nation-state of Israel with help from an enormous number of US weapons, has killed nearly 43,000 Palestinians in Gaza, the vast majority women and children (nearly 16,500 dead children; as of July: 21,000 children missing). The death and destruction in and of Gaza are horrific, nearly impossible to comprehend. Famine has set in, the place is left with dead bodies and ruined houses, the uncounted dead lie underneath and among the rubble, the universities and hospitals have been destroyed, the number of maimed children and adults has yet to counted.
Today—at this moment—we are witness to Israel’s annihilation of the Palestinian people in Gaza. This is not a “war” of equals. And the violence did not begin on October 7.
Yet mention of the past—of history and context that might help make sense of why Hamas fighters breached the fence and went on a well-prepared, hours-long killing spree—has been met with overt effort to muzzle it, drowned out by a regime of silencing that has found strong institutional and individual support in the US and most of Europe in the post October 7 period. This regime of silencing relies on tried and true tactics that include menacing, intimidation, name calling, banishment, laws, threats of physical harm, and the threat of McCarthyism revived. The regime of silencing also heavily relies on narratives that are at once distortions and contain elements of truth. It also relies on human fear and grief. It is a sad irony that true safety and security cannot be achieved without grappling with history—the causes, consequences, and likely outcomes of state terrorism.
Tracing the “the path” to understanding might take us to the late 1890s (with the intellectual origins of Zionism) or 1917 (the Balfour Declaration) or 1920 (establishment of the British mandate for Palestine) or 1948 (the establishment of the state of Israel alongside the Nakba) or even 1967 (the establishment of the Occupied Territories). Then there are critical events in between and since—revolts and wars, commissions and partitions, cantonizations and annexations.
Anthropologist Jeff Halper writing in An Israeli in Palestine, observes that “The Zionist movement created a national narrative while still in Europe. It had little to do with the actual country of Palestine, and certainly did not include Arabs. It was a completely Jewish story, compelling and self-contained.” Halper concludes, “It took me many years to appreciate how central exclusivity was …” (emphasis mine) (Halper 2008: 67). I choose that quote, abbreviated here but worthwhile in full, because it captures an essential feature of the history that continues to haunt: exclusivity means erasure of the people already on the land that would become the nation-state of Israel in 1948. Despite that Palestinian Arabs comprised 95% of the population at the turn of the 20th century, early Zionist Israel Zangwill wrote, “Palestine is a country without a people; the Jews are a people without a country,” a mythic mantra that continues to be invoked.
In a series of essays, Hannah Arendt offered critical assessment of the founding of Israel (Arendt 1978: 124-192). She explains: By 1944, the Revisionist Zionists won out—in Arendt’s words, those who “claim[ed] the whole of Palestine and Transjordan.” Whereas the 1942 Biltmore Conference “offered” some minority rights to the majority population of Palestinian Arabs, the Revisionist platform eliminated all consideration of Palestinians, a position she called a “deadly blow” to Arabs and Jews in Palestine. Arendt quotes from the World Zionist Organization’s 1944 Atlantic City Resolution: The “free and democratic Jewish commonwealth…shall embrace the whole of Palestine, undivided and undiminished.” In this resolution, Arendt observes, “the Arabs were simply not mentioned” (Arendt 1978: 131).
Arendt also traces the “doctrine of eternal antisemitism” to the Zionist platform developed by Theodor Herzl who founded the World Zionist Organization in 1897. In 1946, Arendt wrote, “Herzl applied his concept of universal anti-Semitism to all non-Jewish peoples. All one had to do was use the ‘propelling force of anti-Semitism,’ which, like ‘the wave of the future,’ would bring Jews into the promised land.” Her very next paragraph began, “Today reality has become a nightmare.” (Arendt 1978: 174).
Of course, there was the nightmare of the Shoah and the annihilation of European Jewry. Arendt doesn’t leave it at that. She continues her keen observation: “Herzl’s picture of the Jewish people as surrounded and forced together by a world of enemies has in our day conquered the Zionist movement and become the common sentiment of the Jewish masses….[But] This does not make Herzl’s picture any truer—it only makes it more dangerous.” Importantly, Arendt saw a distinction between a Jewish homeland, which, in her words, “must never be sacrificed to the pseudo-sovereignty of a Jewish State.” (Arendt 1978: 192)
Yet, a “homeland” has been sacrificed to what Halper calls “Fortress Israel,” an ethnocracy that has “reduced the conflict with Palestinians to one consideration: personal security” (Halper 2008: 63; 65; 234-237). In the name of security, Israel continues to expand its territorial control by violently dispossessing Palestinians who are depicted as the “toxic other,” narratives and images that depict Palestinians as nothing more than antisemitic terrorists, who, as sociologist M. Muhannad Ayyash observes, “positions Palestinians for expulsion, a distinctive form of anti-Palestinian racism.” (Ayyash 2023: 961).
Image by Howard Horowitz
With this narrative, there is no need to make sense of what happened on October 7. The response need only be the genocidal violence we are witness to right now. Wipe out the toxic other, capture Gaza; if any Palestinians are left, they will be trapped in iron cages even more impenetrable than the great, hi-tech, “iron wall” so proudly displayed by Israel’s security establishment. In the aftermath of October 7, the discussion will stall at what went wrong with security and how to build even greater fortresses.
Meantime, the conflation of “Jewish” with political Zionism and the nation-state of Israel, now fully institutionalized, is predictably bringing about a process Arendt identified as “radical deception—lying the truth”; that is, the conversion of a lie into a reality. Israel, having established horrific, intolerable living conditions for Palestinians under its control at the same time engages in the practice of conflating any criticism of its policies as instances of prejudice against Israel. By these twin actions, Israel is engaging in classic radical deception—lying the truth, cultivating antisemitism. It brings into being actual antisemitism, which is always contingent upon specific conditions, a fact obfuscated by the powerful, essentialist narrative of “eternal antisemitism.” This, of course, makes Israel “bad for the Jews” (Judt 2003; see also Cypel 2021).
Prior to October 7, the silencing regime was well in place and practiced, as Nada and others have experienced. Its practices include the suppression and outlawing of the nonviolent BDS movement, and the adoption by local and national governments of the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism that includes criticism of Israel as an example of such.
Since October 7, the silencing regime has been in full force alongside a dramatic, international increase in collective and individual voices of opposition. Examples of those subject to silencing include: Maura Finkelstein, Masha Gessen; Jonathan Glazer; Ghassan Hage; Stella Maris; several university presidents; and protesting US college students and faculty.
It has also hit home for me, personally.
I return to the story with which I began: Nada Khader’s expulsion from a public school in Chappaqua, NY. My husband, Howard, is the president of the WESPAC board, the peace and justice foundation for which Nada serves as executive director. Subsequent to her banishment, Nada’s attorney, a civil rights lawyer named Robert (Bob) Herbst, was successful in getting the ban lifted, though the school board did so without making a public announcement. On November 15, my husband and Nada’s attorney—two Jewish men in their 70s—attended a Board of Education meeting. Amid a hostile audience, the lawyer spoke on behalf of Nada and the board president spoke on behalf of WESPAC. They were greeted with all-too-familiar, false, defaming allegations: Students and parents who unmistakably conflate “Zionism” and “Jewish,” accused Bob and Howard of being antisemitic representatives of a hate group that supports terrorists. They were also greeted with boos, hostile glares, snickers, and at one point, surrounded by thugs who menacingly followed the two elderly men into the parking lot upon conclusion of the meeting.
In the weeks and months that followed, Howard and WESPAC were depicted in a NY Jewish Week article in alarmist terms suggesting they hold contemptible attitudes and are involved in suspicious activities. The article was picked up and disseminated further by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency; ultimately its worst excerpts found their way into Rupert Murdoch’s media properties, the New York Post and the Wall Street Journal; most recently, the Jerusalem Post headlined Howard along with George Soros. Not surprisingly, the WESPAC office has received hate mail and threatening phone messages. For his views, my husband received verbal blows from a local rabbi, was ejected from his long-standing role on the Board of the Westchester Jewish Coalition for Immigration and threatened with expulsion from his over thirty-year membership in the local reform temple where for decades he had been an active, progressive, Jewish voice for peace with justice.
It seems dissenters like my husband, Howard, are subject to “cherem”—banning from the Jewish people. Dan Elbaum, the North American head of the Jewish Agency for Israel said as much about those Jews who are members of groups such as IfNotNow and Jewish Voice for Peace. Elbaum declared, “I do not consider them Jews,” a sentiment shared by other powerful gatekeepers and their followers whose mission is forced consensus, solidarity with an oppressive regime, and ultimately, subservience to the state.
Is this or is this not indication of “today’s totalitarianism”?
REFERENCES:
Arendt, Hannah. The Jew as Pariah: Jewish Identity and Politics in the Modern Age, edited by Ron H. Feldman. New York: Grove Press, 1978.
Ayyash, M. Muhannad. “The Toxic Other: The Palestinian Critique and Debates about Race and Racism.” Critical Sociology, Vol. 49, No. 6, 2023: 953-966.
Cypel, Sylvain. The State of Israel vs. The Jewish People. New York: Other Press, 2021.
Halper, Jeff. An Israeli in Palestine: Resisting Dispossession, Redeeming Israel. London and Ann Arbor: Pluto Press, 2008.
Judt, Tony. “Israel: The Alternative.” New York Review of Books. October 23, 2003. Accessed October 2, 2024.
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2003/10/23/israel-the-alternative/
Khalidi, Rashid. The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood. Boston: Beacon Press, 2006.
Alisse Waterston is Presidential Scholar and Professor Emerita, CUNY, John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Among her seven books is the graphic novel Light in Dark Times (2020) and My Father’s Wars: Migration, Memory, and the Violence of a Century, an intimate ethnography (10th anniversary edition, 2024). A Fellow of the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Studies (SCAS), Waterston is past-President of the American Anthropological Association (2015-17).
Cite this article as: Waterston, Alisse. October 2024. 'Living in and with a Regime of Silencing: Narrative Control and Totalitarian Inclinations since October 7, 2023'. Today's Totalitarianism. https://todaystotalitarianism.com/regime-of-silencing
