“It’s complicated,” they tell you in elementary schools during the sanitized version of US history when you get to the many horrific parts.
“It’s complicated,” predators often say when someone finally asks them to explain their abusive behavior.
“It’s complicated,” comes the jangled reply when institutions have to account for why they protect so many terrible people, or don’t stand up for the values they claim to be founded on, or further marginalize their most vulnerable community members.
Under other circumstances, noting something’s complicated would imply you’re going to explain that complexity, unravel it some, but in all these situations, there’s either no follow up or only the vague, hand-wavey kind. That’s because ‘complicated’ in this usage is meant simply as a period — it marks the end of a conversation. A silencing tactic. “It’s complicated,” and then the so we’re not going to talk any more about it, is left silent but implied.
Because more than anything else, the role of “It’s complicated” here is to do one thing, and that’s flatten power imbalances. When things are “complicated,” it’s easy to imagine that everyone shares an equal amount of blame, that things just got messy for a bit but now they’re okay, that power is evenly distributed among each party, and these things just happen. You’ll see people and institutions employ “It’s complicated” alongside the passive voice and the general, resigned sense of destiny.
But these power imbalances, these hierarchies, while often complicated, are never destiny, never happen passively, and inherently are not natural. And we must place them in the sunlight to deal with them properly.
“It’s complicated” in this usage is an invitation not to look too hard, and too often, we take it. Because power imbalances are uncomfortable, often don’t fit the dominant narrative of heroism and innocence that make up our national origin stories, and usually pulling one thread unravels a shit ton more than just the single scarf. That’s why people with power suddenly get so squirrely about talking about it, and with a simple, well understood but meaningless phrase they try to make it all just a wash.
“It’s complicated,” is what teachers tell many American Jews in liberal Hebrew school when the lessons turns to modern Israeli history. I know because that’s what they told us, over and over, in my Hebrew school, until we stopped asking questions. “No one really lived there before, not really,” goes one of the lies meant to quiet the whole conversation, erase an entire people, and ignore the glaring, horrific truths.
“This is a complicated conflict,” the Israeli ambassador to the UK responded when pressed about the thousands of civilians murdered in her country’s bombardment of Gaza.
“The question of whether Palestinians deserve to be free is a complex and sensitive topic,” ChatGPT replied when a user asked if Palestinians should be free.
True to form, neither followed up with any real attempt to untangle those complexities — the ambassador tried to use the debate over a single hospital bombing to avoid talking about all the other hospitals, and religious sites, and evacuation points, that Israel had just bombed, continues to bomb with unfathomable loss of life. The chatbot did what chatbots always do: it regurgitated a bunch of racist nonsense deflections reflecting today’s nasty discourse, and then, when asked if Israelis deserve freedom, immediately replied with a yes.
That chatbot one is illuminating, in a way, which is maybe the first and only time you’ll ever hear me say that about a chatbot. Because while one of the worst parts about this form of gaslighting is that all of these are in fact complicated as hell, (and that’s all the more reason to go deeper into them and learn more, not shrug the whole thing off), what’s often revealed when we finally look at them more, beyond the power imbalance, is that there are aspects of all these situations that are not at all complicated, are extremely straight forward and clear, and the freedom of an entire people is one of those things.
People should be free, all people. Very simple. The Palestinian people, just like the Jewish people, should be free, all of them. Free from tyranny, oppression, starvation, bombings, apartheid. But they’re not. They should be safe, but they’re not. Period. Speaking this basic truth, which is not only self-evident but enshrined in plenty of charters that the US claims to uphold, has gotten powerful people fired or pushed out of positions. The pressure campaigns, often mounted by the same people who rail against what they call “cancel culture,” are working, and in them we can see the desperate push to dehumanize, the representational groundwork for genocide.
Another thing that is very straight forward here: the military that is violently enforcing their oppression and now murdering them by the thousands is one of the most high-tech and well funded armed forces in the world. More than that, we in the US fund the Israeli military with US tax dollars, which means those of us who pay taxes are financially contributing to the slaughter happening right now, whether we like it or not. When it comes to the Palestinian side, there is simply no comparison. These are not two equal armies at war. This is a massacre of extermination.
I’ve seen a lot of people, mostly center/left politicians and pundits in the US take issue with the word genocide literally as Israeli bombs wipe out entire families taking shelter in the very safe zones they were told to evacuate to. Even as bombs begin to fall on the West Bank, far from the stated targets of this attack. I get it: words matter; especially ones like genocide. They shouldn’t be used lightly. No one is using it lightly. The rhetoric from the Israeli government has been explicit, over and over: they plan to wipe out an entire population which they do not consider to be civilians. Their actions have borne that out. The dehumanizing language of genocide is etched into the words of the people yelling the loudest that that’s not what’s happening. Meanwhile, human rights groups are warning that this is what’s happening. The people on the ground know that’s what’s happening. The people committing it are being abundantly clear that’s what’s happening. The only people who seem to be confused are the ones trying to cling on to a narrative of innocent heroism, the same narrative the US still tries to spin about its own creation myth. I know quibbling about words is easier to deal with than the reality of a genocide going on right in front of us and our own complicity in it, but right now we truly need to put that bullshit away and confront the moment we’re in.
Some things are not complicated, even amidst a sea of complexity. Freedom is one of them. The terrifying rise in anti-semitism, fueled by some of the same people who are cheering on the bombardment of Gaza, does not complicate this truth, it crystalizes it. None of us will be free until Palestine is free. This is not just rhetoric or poetics. It is a truth I know in my heart. Our safety and rights are not sanctified by statehood, by walls, by guns. Those things will not protect us, only pull us deeper into this blood soaked mire. The only way out is freedom for everyone.
Anyone who tells you their freedom is contingent on another people’s oppression isn’t really seeking freedom, they’re seeking domination.
Freedom doesn’t come from other people being enslaved, it comes from everyone being free. Freedom isn’t a finite resource, no matter how much capitalism tries to convince us it is. It can’t be hoarded, only shared. The more you participate in other people’s freedom, the freer you are. The wider we kick open the door of world, the more sunlight spreads across the lies of our national origin stories, across the dividing lines of nation states and systems that place our value in dollar signs, the more those shadows shrink, the more freedom rises and with it we rise too, and we rise together.