The Cost of Silence
It won't protect you
“We could see a merry-go-round, people, we could hear music, and we were terribly afraid that this music would drown us out and that those people would never notice a thing, that nobody in the world would notice a thing: us, the struggle, the dead...That this wall was so huge, that nothing, no message about us, would ever make it out.”
Marek Edelman, leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943, from Shielding The Flame.
Palestinians trying to survive the genocide in Gaza have had one plea: that we amplify their voices and raise our own to bring an end to this ongoing massacre. “If I must die/ you must live / to tell my story,” Refaat Alareer wrote in his final poem, shortly before an Israeli missile assassinated him and his family. “If I must die / let it bring hope / let it be a tale.” Over and over again, this is the straightforward, urgent request, seen most recently when the journalists Motaz and Bisan called for a global general strike on Monday, December 11 as the UN prepared to vote once again on a ceasefire.
The cost of speaking out about Palestine has been made abundantly clear — people have been fired, doxxed, blacklisted, and dogpiled. And none of that has compared to the cost of simply being Palestinian, which is often simply your life.
But let’s also talk about those who choose not to speak.
When Audre Lorde said your silence will not protect you, she wasn’t just being poetic. While a Western approved, US funded genocide unfolds in Palestine, not saying a word about it may save you from being blacklisted or losing a job, but ultimately, there is still, always, a more immeasurable but often much more meaningful price to pay.
The first cost is very simple — it’s the price paid by others, and it matters the most even if it affects you, the silent one, the least. Your silence allows the genocide to continue. It guarantees your role in extending that silence forcefully to those who are being slaughtered, who ask only that they not die without a chance to speak to the world that insists on ignoring them.
Speaking out opens up a million possibilities — one small voice can inspire ten thousand more — we don’t truly know what effect our words or our platform can have, we don’t know where this groundswell will lead. But we know that the people on the ground in Palestine see people across the world standing up with them, and know they’re not alone, even in their darkest hours, and we know that because they have taken the time to tell us, even as they try desperately to stay alive. This matters.
It is very literally a question of life and death. Silence will certainly allow the bombs we already paid for to not only keep dropping, but to do so with the tacit approval of the world, certified by our collective silence.
And while it’s clear speaking out won’t be the only thing to stop this genocide, one day the slaughter and the occupation will end, and when it happens, it will be in part because the world turned itself inside out to say, as one: No.
And it’s clear that every day until that moment, Israel will murder more Palestinians. The more we speak out, the more we disrupt, the closer that moment comes.
I’m not going to get into what staying quiet does to your soul, because that’s really none of my business.
But what I do know is that we as artists, writers, actors, creators, influencers, anyone with any kind of platform whatsoever — are, whether we like it or not, constantly engaging with the concept of safety in the world. In Renaissance, Beyoncé talks a lot about wanting to create a safe space for people who have been traumatized, of being intentional about using performance, spectacle, community, to invite people into a place where they can be there authentic selves. That lovely idea felt so hollow once the inevitable result of her own silence and screening the movie in Israel happened: images of people using the songs of Renaissance as anthems for more genocide.
And that gets me to what I want to tell you about staying silent: it rests on the false notion that you can please everyone. You can’t. No matter how badly you want to, you will alienate people, hurt them, make them feel left out. This is a very basic truth of being an artist, and most know it on some level, but when it comes to speaking out or having an opinion about things, many quickly retreat to that ultimately infantile notion that if you play it safe enough, everyone will feel at home in your work.
The truth is, many of us navigate a world that does not welcome us or want us to be here, and a failure to acknowledge that truth only lets us know that you’ve chosen to close your eyes and hope it all goes away, which we know very well that it won’t.
I think about this in terms of the classroom setting: the traditional approach to education is to just barrel through and hope no difficult issues emerge and no one says anything fucked up. But this is the United States of America, so they almost always do. Then, even though it happens again and again, the inevitable response from grown adults who’ve spent their whole careers in education, is absolute shock that it could here! In this fine institution! Meanwhile, students who’ve lived their whole lives seeing exactly this happen and can’t afford to pretend it doesn’t exist because it literally might kill them — they have been saying it would happen all along and are left unsupported and with a whole bunch of labor to do when it does.
When you address issues of oppression directly, proactively, at the top of things, as part of the foundational work of education, two things generally happen:
1. Students who have always felt safe and protected by institutional silence about oppression suddenly get uncomfortable. Not unsafe, mind you: uncomfortable, which any educator worth their salt will tell you is part of learning, sometimes the only way to lean, and growing up. They won’t just be okay — they’ll be better for the experience.
2. Students who have been antagonized by institutions their whole lives feel seen, acknowledged, and supported, often for the first time in a setting like this, and consequently are able to engage more deeply and authentically with their academic experience than they ever had before.
There’s usually a deeply unserious, infantilizing overreaction to the first one — we see it over and over— coupled with a dehumanizing dismissal of the importance of the second. Institutions often go out of their way to make sure this framework does not become the norm and then are once again absolutely stunned and appalled when the next heinous act of racism or homophobia or assault happens on campus.
This same truth holds when it comes to art, to story, to journalism, to any form of creativity.
Speaking out isn’t easy. That is very deliberate. It took me years to figure out how to do it about zionism. I was concentrating my organizing and speaking out on problems that I perceived to be more in my immediate surroundings. And sure, they were in a way, but there’s a dodge in this. There’s nothing more immediate than the money in our pockets, and most of us are directly funding this genocide. As Jews, there’s nothing more personal than our names, which are being used — with or without our consent — to justify this genocide. We cannot ignore that just because it’s happening far away. The urgency of this moment, as Israeli bombs kill hundreds of people a day and many thousands more in danger of death from starvation and disease, demands that we learn from each others’ mistakes, get over the blocks we’ve put in place to keep us quiet, and do what must be done.
Silence is always political, but in this instance, there’s a particularly sharp angle that silence upholds, whether intentionally or not. Zionism demands the erasure of Palestinian existence in its entirety. Its whole foundation anchors on the principle of Palestinian life, culture, history, being null. The self-made narrative of zionist innocence depends on Palestinian lives not mattering. This is why we’ve seen a renewed insistence that anti-zionism is antisemitism (it’s not), why the simple existence of a Palestinian flag on a college campus brings accusations of a hate crime. And of course, this is not new: “it is a striking fact,” Edward Said wrote in his 1979 book The Question of Palestine, “that to merely mention the Palestinians or Palestine in Israel, or to a convinced Zionist, is to name the unnameable, so powerfully does our bare existence serve to accuse Israel of what it did to us.” When we don’t speak up, we’re playing into the dialectical erasure of an entire people as it happens in real time to real people in the form of mass murder.
It's consistently the marginalized people on my timeline, the people with the most to lose, in the most precarious professional and legal situations, who are the loudest about injustice everywhere. Perhaps it’s because we know from experience that if we let it happen there, we’ll be next. Perhaps it’s because we’ve tasted the cruelty of other people’s indifference to our struggle, and we don’t want it to ever happen to anyone else.
At the end of the day, being a person with a platform in a time of genocide who chooses to remain silent alerts people that you might not be someone safe to be ourselves with. You may notice it in your personal or professional relationships — a distancing. There’s largely one reason to speak up, but there are many, many reasons people stay silent. A dwindling few are actually good ones. Yes, there is work to be done behind the scenes, but often we need to really ask ourselves if that’s what we’re doing, or if that’s another way to avoid the real work. And that same silence guarantees that no one else knows what that reason is. People are right to wonder.
I don’t say that out of spite or as a threat — it’s a straightforward consequence of your actions and inactions. I say it, in fact, from a place of compassion. These aren’t necessarily gaps that can’t be breached, but there’s no healing, ever, without recognition of the problem.
That distance is not the same as being blacklisted; it’s usually not a political decision that someone is taking to negatively affect you. You’re not being boycotted. People are trying to heal, to process grief and accountability and their own power and responsibility. People are flinging themselves headfirst into the upside down world of what’s happening and doing their best to come out on the other side to face whatever’s next with our souls intact. How do we do that with someone who won’t say one word about a genocide? How do we continue in community with the determinedly silent?
The answer, if there is one, is not simple. There are levels, angles. There are ever changing dynamics. But it doesn’t come until we ask the question.
Maybe, like me, when you read up on the history of the Holocaust, colonialism, slavery, you wondered who you would be in those moments, what role you would play. Maybe now you feel like you know, and you’re not happy about it. The truth, though, is that we’re still living through this moment, and you still can do something about it.
This is not an invitation to explain to me why you personally are staying silent. It’s not a subtweet to anyone in my own life. I’ve dealt with what I have to deal with and I’m good. I don’t write this to make you feel guilty; guilt does nobody any good. It’s not a useful space to organize from, it mostly just gets in the way. And I’m not here to absolve anyone in private. That’s missing the point. If anything, it’s a conversation to have with your community, whatever that may be.
I get the sense that people and organizations are hoping this will just pass so we can all get back to normal, whatever that is. I’m here to say: that’s not how any of this works. If you want it to pass, you can take part in moving it along. If you think the world will ever be the same, you haven’t been paying attention.
I keep having to stop myself from turning this into a primer on how to speak out or find your voice, but at the end of the day, that’s not for me to tell you. I probably don’t even know you!
What I will say is this: It’s easy to get caught up in the complexities of it all, whether the history started thousands of years ago, seventy-five years ago, or in October (it didn’t start in October). But at the end of the day, one truth remains forever clear, extremely simple: people deserve to be free. There’s no crime someone can commit that negates that fact for the rest of their people. There’s no rational, non-bigoted way to justify apartheid, genocide, ethnic cleansing. Let’s take that as a starting point.
As artists, creators, storytellers, we are the ones making the music that Marek Edelman describes, just outside the walls of the ghetto. We can play as loud as possible, try to drown out the cries for help from within, or we can open up the song, find harmonies, and make room for those voices to ring out across the world. If we’re really doing our work, the power of those voices rising together will send the walls crashing to the ground forever.
And as someone deeply familiar with the power of words, stories, and the way spirit moves through them, I can tell you they matter — maybe more than anything else on this earth. Words don’t just interpret the world, they transform it. This is conjure work. The stories we tell become true. So if you’re wondering how to speak out, you can start with this basic phrase: Free Palestine.
Very simple, very straightforward, and the more we say it, the more of us who say it, the more it will become true.
LINKS:
Guante’s resource for artists who want to speak out on Palestine but aren’t sure how: https://racketmn.com/for-artists-and-musicians-who-want-to-speak-out-about-palestine-but-arent-sure-how
A moving open letter from Jewish students at Brown: https://www.browndailyherald.com/article/2023/11/an-open-letter-from-jewish-students
Writers Against the War on Gaza:
https://www.writersagainstthewarongaza.com/
And more links from
SupportPalestine Action:
https://www.palestineaction.orgDissenters against the War Machine:
https://wearedissenters.orgApply pressure for a ceasefire now:
https://ceasefiretoday.com/Take action with Jewish Voice for Peace:
https://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.orgTake action with the Palestinian Youth Movement:
https://palestinianyouthmovement.com/Take action with IfNotNow:
https://www.ifnotnowmovement.org/Support Boycots, Divestmest, and Sanctions:
https://bdsmovement.net/