On Criticism, Zadie Smith, and the Abuse of Language

In The World, the Text, and the Critic, literary professor Edward Said espouses the importance of criticism.

“I take criticism so seriously,” he writes, “as to believe that, even in the midst of a battle in which one is unmistakably on one side against another, there should be criticism, because there must be critical consciousness if there are to be issues, problems, values, even lives to be fought for.”

I have tried to engage in criticism of this style and in this spirit. I may not always have succeeded but I hold tightly onto these words.

For this reason, I didn’t want to put much stock in Zadie Smith’s essay published in The New Yorker early last week. I saw the copious criticisms (and a few praises) of Smith’s critique of the Palestine solidarity encampments that have swept across college campuses in the US and beyond. Some of these were constructive and others seemed more intent on airing already held antipathy towards Smith than on addressing anything she had written.

Let me be clear, I don’t think it is necessary for us to be 100% percent in alignment with those who share, or purport to, our broad political views and I don’t think disagreement automatically denotes an ethical failure. All of which is to say that I supported her right to make the criticisms.

And yet, criticism isn’t automatically worthwhile simply because it exists. Its substance matters just as much if not more than that of which it critiques, since it is putting the subject of its criticism under the microscope and rendering judgement. All too often, I have seen cynical commentary on social media and the hallowed pages of prestigious literary journals alike that uses criticism as a pretext for personal attacks.

At first, I even welcomed some of what I thought Smith’s essay was about. When I heard that Smith had written an essay deconstructing the weaponization and abuse of language that has characterised the multi-decade Israel-Palestine “conflict,” my first thought was “At last! Someone is taking Israeli and Western politicians to task for their gaslighting rhetoric that has been completely at odds with the images streaming out of Gaza.” I figured that I was prepared to read constructive criticism of the protestors in order to read such criticism of the powerful war machine.

Like Kylie, I should be so lucky.

Smith, and I will come back to this later, barely pays any attention to the words of political and military leaders. Sure, their talking points get a cursory mention, but her ire is almost entirely focussed on college student protestors.

Smith laments that their failure to prioritise the feelings of a hypothetical Jewish student who may happen to cross paths with an encampment and decide she feels “unsafe,” makes these kids “too cynical and unworthy” of being likened to the student anti-Vietnam War protestors.

She appears to be arguing that protestors should make it not just a priority but an absolute necessity to put their own feelings about the war on Gaza aside and cater to these hypothetical feelings. If we are to always be on the side of the weak, argues Smith, then in that particular situation, it is the hypothetical Jewish student who represents the weakest party.

Sorry … what? Hypothetical students who may feel “unsafe” – please note that Zadie Smith herself did not agree that such hypothetical students actually are unsafe, only that they may feel so – somehow represent the weakest, most oppressed party in this scenario?

I’m not sure how Smith came to such a conclusion, but I will take the time here to remind everyone that claiming to be “feeling unsafe” or “scared” has long been a tool used by those with power against those without (I wrote an entire book on this in fact), and by those with weapons against those without.

After shooting his partner Reeva Steenkamp, disgraced white South African Paralympian Oscar Pistorius claimed it was an accident. That he thought she was an intruder, and was so “scared” at an unidentified noise coming from behind his closed bathroom door that he shot wildly, firing four times while an unarmed Steenkamp hid inside.

As I wrote at the time in my essay, ‘Safety is in the eye of the gun holder’, even if we take him at his word that he was scared, even if Pistorius “felt” unsafe, it was always only Steenkamp who was in danger.

I was initially content to privately disagree with Smith’s reasoning and put the essay out of my mind given the very non-hypothetical looming invasion of Rafah.

But I have spent the past week witnessing image after horrific image as Gazans continue to document their own genocide. I have been consumed by the sick dread of knowing 1.5 million people with nowhere to go and no permission to go there anyway, were trapped in an area of land the size of an airport, that they could do little else but wait for their time to be killed.

And so I kept returning to Smith’s thesis that both Israel and the student protestors (what an equation!) weaponize and abuse language to justify their position.

And I felt contempt form in the deepest recesses of my gut, because I knew that Smith had not merely written something I disagreed with, but that she had committed a cardinal writing sin: she was engaging in the very action she was ostensibly critiquing.

Smith equates such statements as “There is no such thing as a Palestinian people” a long-repeated mantra of Israeli politicians and military officials as well as ordinary citizens with statements such as “Zionist colonial state,” a statement that has gained mainstream traction only in recent months and which is not used to rationalise and enable political and military activity but to protest against it.

The first statement isn’t merely a description of Palestinians but is a rhetorical statement that is repeatedly invoked to justify the continued occupation of Palestinian land and denial of Palestinian sovereignty and statehood. Regardless of whether you agree that Israel is a colonial state, it is disingenuous to equate these two statements since they serve two very different rhetorical as well as practical functions.

Smith is doing the very thing she decries – she is abusing language to deny a power imbalance and further marginalise the “weakest,” not just in the room but at this moment in time, perhaps in the entire world.  

Smith’s equivocation is yet another of the many ways that various Western institutions and practices enable this very massacre we are witnessing. Rather than imbue the rhetoric of student protestors with gravity as she claims to be doing, Smith’s essay only serves to strip the rhetoric of Israeli officials of theirs, rendering the rhetoric of each no more or less dangerous than the other.

This cannot be an oversight on her part. Smith is too smart and gifted a writer to not know what she was doing.

Smith goes on to provide examples of how language is abused by “both sides” in this conflict. “We must eliminate Hamas,” and “Zionist” are defined by Smith as “shibboleths” – statements that “describe a people, by defining them against other people—but the people being described are ourselves.”

To strip the power and purpose of the first statement – “we must eliminate Hamas”  – which is the very pretext on which this entire genocidal campaign rests and is cynically invoked to absolve Israel of all responsibility, is such a gross perversion of the English language that I have to wonder if Smith is aware that her entire essay reads as a shibboleth of its own.

The reason that so many people remain unmoved by the images of thousands of dead Palestinian children is because the rhetoric of the Israeli state has given them permission to look at Palestinian children and see only terrorists. At the very least, it has given them an excuse to look away, to justify why dead children are not really considered children and perhaps may not even be dead.

I do not for a second believe that Israel believes it is fighting only terrorism and that its supporters repeat these talking points as some kind of unconscious statement of group identity.

These talking points are not shibboleths as Smith claims but absolutions.

Smith stakes her “rhetorical flag in that fantastical, linguistical, conceptual, unreal place—built with words” by decrying the ways the words “Jew” and “colonialist” are used as synonyms.

But by who Zadie? Who is routinely and consciously equating these two terms? If it’s Palestinians in Palestine, then by definition they are correct – from the perspective of occupied and colonised Palestinians, all Jewish citizens of Israel are colonialists, much as all white settlers were colonialists in the heyday of the British Empire.

But if it is in reference to the student protestors, then it’s a mindboggling statement for a writer of Smith’s calibre to offer without evidence, not least because she omits to mention that Jewish people themselves form a core part of the anti-war bloc.

Nonetheless, Smith insists that “Jew” and colonialist” are used synonymously and then, perhaps to remind us of how fair and balanced she is, follows this up with a condemnation of  how “Palestinian” and “terrorist” are also used as synonymous.

This is another rhetorical sleight of hand because these two words are routinely used as synonyms, and not merely by the average citizen or even the most ardent supporter of Israel’s policies. They are used as synonyms by Israeli political and military officials. Like “we must eliminate Hamas,” they too have been used to rationalise and justify not only this latest iteration of the war on Gaza but of the entire Occupation of Palestine. Here are some recent examples.

I am struggling to understand why Smith feels that this is the time for a critique that places student protestors under a less forgiving microscope than that which they are protesting: a merciless war on a mostly civilian, unarmed, caged population perpetrated by one of the world’s greatest powers with the full and unyielding support of the world’s only superpower.

These are not shibboleths, these are facts.

I am not claiming that the rhetoric of anti-war protestors is beyond criticism. What I am saying is that Smith sets up a false equation because while the term “Zionist,” when used as an epithet may well qualify as a “shibboleth,” as Smith uses the term, statements such as “we must eliminate Hamas,” are so much more.

Smith’s equation can only hold if she ignores the substantial critiques of Zionism from prominent Jewish public figures, including most recently Naomi Klein who wrote in The Guardian that Jewish people need an “exodus from Zionism.”

Smith defends Zionism by claiming that its meaning has evolved since its modern inception in the late 1800s, and that it no longer means now what it meant at Israel’s founding in 1948. Again, to make this argument she must ignore the words not only of Jews critical of Zionism but of Zionists themselves.

Words like that of the anonymous Zionist interviewed by Amos Oz during Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in the early 1980s, who declared he had no problem killing as many Arabs as possible because “the dirty work of Zionism is not finished yet.” This quote is often misattributed to Ariel Sharon, but while this attribution is false, the words themselves, which essentially blame Arabs for the entire history of antisemitic brutality and trauma and use it as a basis to rationalise and justify Israeli violence, are all too real.

Smith must also ignore far more recent statements that spell out the intentions of Zionism, that once Gaza was dealt with, Israel would turn its attention to the rest of the region and stretch its borders from the Nile river in Egypt to the Euphrates in Iraq. That the “dirty work” of Zionism is to reshape the entire Middle East. She must ignore that Israel purposefully does not declare its borders to allow for this very expansion.

I think we can all see by now that western media can be at its most biased when it purports to be objective and impartial. Smith has done what so many journalists have insisted on doing before her: she has equated what it is not possible to equate.

It is not possible to balance an inherently lopsided battle. As I have written before on this topic, being fair and objective entails far more than merely presenting two sides to a story or pretending each side’s opinions are equally valid and equally culpable. It also entails – or should – an assessment of what each side has to gain from their rhetoric, why that rhetoric exists.

Israel wants to maintain its Occupation of Palestine and expand its borders, and this is reflected in its rhetoric. Palestinians want sovereignty and an end to the Occupation, and this is reflected in theirs.

Again, let me clear, it’s not that Zadie Smith critiques the language of these protests that makes her essay so underhanded. I still believe that criticism is not only acceptable but necessary. But it must also be fair-minded. What makes Smith’s unfair is that she presents their language as no more or less dangerous and cynical than that of Israel and its allies.

It is so very frustrating to agree with the premise of what a writer is claiming only to witness them flouting it.

This is the true intellectual dishonesty underwriting Smith’s essay. She used the slogans of student protestors not to mount a constructive critique that can help them strengthen their cause and bring their words and actions into alignment, which is the true function of criticism. Rather, she undermines any attempt to critique the rhetoric of Israeli officials which serve a far more nefarious purpose.

It is not only the actions of the war machine that have allowed this genocide to continue unabated. It is the rhetoric of everyone from Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu who urged his population to “remember what Amalek has done to you,” a Biblical reference and battle cry taken up by Israeli soldiers and pop stars alike, to White House spokesperson Matt Miller whose stock response to journalists who bring up reports of Israeli war crimes is to claim he “hasn’t read the report,” to Palantir CEO Alex Carp who claimed that “peace activists are actually the war activists,” to, of all people, Dr Phil who has just waded in with his two cents to claim that the students protestors are actually “supporters of Hamas.”

This rhetoric traps us in a war of words to give time to the war machine to do what it does.

“Language is your accomplice and alibi in all of it,” writes Smith in her concluding paragraph. “Language euphemized, instrumentalized, and abused, put to work for your cause and only for your cause, so that it does exactly and only what you want it to do.”

I could say the same about Smith, but she claims to be immune to any criticism that might arise from her essay because “It is [her] view that [her] personal views have no more weight than an ear of corn in this particular essay. The only thing that has any weight in this particular essay is the dead.”

But who has killed them Zadie? Student protestors chanting that Israel is a Zionist colonial state, or Israeli politicians who claim that they only target terrorists and that there are no innocent civilians in Gaza? That they simply must continue their onslaught on Gaza to eliminate Hamas?

An abuse of language indeed.