I have a question you may not like

It's time to start answering all of the uncomfortable questions.

Earlier this year, I was debriefing an event on the differences between the Israeli-Palestinian situation and South African apartheid with two of my fellow Jewish Students Association executives. The conversation turned to the difficult topic of how we decide when to apply terminology developed around a particular situation to a new context. This discussion has frequently arisen around the use of the word “genocide”, whose meaning was designed to address the context of the Holocaust but has since been applied to events in Cambodia, Rwanda, and most recently in recognizing the cultural genocide of Indigenous Canadians, among others. My peer asked when we can classify something other than South Africa as an “apartheid”? 

It’s a challenging question, particularly in discussing Israel, which is so frequently mislabelled as an apartheid state, despite the reality resting very far from the definition of apartheid. The question made all of us uncomfortable, including the one asking it. But in better understanding human rights and international legal systems, it’s an important question to answer. However, to adequately respond to the question involves setting aside all of the gut reactions that make me, and many others, want to brush it off. 

For the past two years, we have been in the process of having a lot of difficult conversations, and I have commented on them many times. But we are having these conversations, always, on the terms of one side, and what this means is that some critical but complex questions are not getting answered because they require challenging the new narrative. 

I don’t want to be answering questions about the difference between Israel and apartheid. It makes my skin crawl. But having an answer to that question that is deeper than simply accusing the person asking it of Antisemitism is important. It’s essential for the person hearing my response and for myself to have thought through the positions I am espousing with a critical lens and an awareness of complexity. 

Under the new moral orthodoxy, only specific difficult questions have been deemed acceptable. While it is fantastic that these questions are being asked, addressed, and thought about, we cannot lose sight of all of the other forces that impact our world and all of the other questions that simultaneously need to be answered. 

Even though Israel is not an apartheid, there are still tricky and upsetting questions about the genuine suffering of Palestinian people and the ongoing struggle to broker peace with the Palestinian Authority and Hamas. Some of these questions may have answers that involve acknowledging realities that we don’t like. 

Under this new belief system, the world has become increasingly black and white, so much so that our ability to decipher between genuine and problematic questions is diminishing. The trigger to label real questions as not deserving of response because they run the risk of shifting some of the burdens of responsibility for how we got where we are, to people who we desperately don’t want to put at fault is a problem. We can acknowledge that there are issues and injustices without requiring those experiencing them to be entirely virtuous. This does not make them less deserving of support or diminish the importance of social change, but it will allow us to have more holistic conversations, and potentially create lasting improvements. Actual change comes from everyone, on every side of a problem, and for that to happen, we need to take a deep breath and ask some uncomfortable questions.  

As much as I would like to continue to speak vaguely or about Jewish issues exclusively, where I feel more freedom to say uncomfortable things, I think that an example here is necessary to demonstrate the problem we need to address. 

Two years ago, in a class on Indigenous law, we discussed the admission of oral history as evidence in court. This evidentiary issue frequently arises in Canada when dealing with Indigenous land claims. I raised my hand to ask how, given the nature of oral histories and linguistic particularities in Indigenous languages, we can determine the integrity of oral histories as told today, to the stories as told initially. I had recently been engaged in conversations about how we can determine if the Torah we read today is the same as the one written by Moses, so the topic had been on my mind. Further, in light of the issues that arose out of conceptions of language and retelling of oral history surrounding the work of Rigoberta Menchu, this felt like an important question for something we are talking about admitting as evidence in court. That question was never answered. It was deemed inappropriate. And while I do not discount the possibility that this question may genuinely be offensive (and please, let me know if it is), to me, it’s similar to asking how we guard against inconsistencies that may arise in any other form of evidence. But it was an uncomfortable question, and I recognized this at the time. 

While I entirely respect my professor’s right to run her classroom as she saw fit and choose which questions do and do not merit an answer, I cannot help but be concerned by the response my question elicited. That reaction to a question I would still genuinely, and with no malice, like to know the answer to, appears to signal something negative in the direction we are heading. 

There are, without a doubt, inappropriate and offensive questions that are not worth the time or energy they will take to answer. But when a question about our ideology is difficult or makes us uncomfortable, before jumping to the conclusion that it does not deserve an answer, it is worthwhile to take a step back. Ask yourself where the question is coming from and if it is from a place of wanting to have a genuine dialogue. Ask yourself if you have a solid answer to that question that could help illuminate something for the other person or yourself. Acknowledging imperfections or challenging parts of things does not mean you are setting aside your convictions; it might mean that you are coming to understand their inherent nuances and complexities better.

No one likes difficult questions, especially when there is some possibility that the answer will run contrary to our desired outcome. But being able to answer these questions, acknowledge there are issues to resolve from many directions, and things that are uncertain, will strengthen not only our discourse with each other and those who disagree with us but also better prepare us for the realities of implementing our worldview.