In Europe and around the world, political debates about complicity in Israel’s genocide in Gaza often revolve around the question of speaking versus remaining silent. A particular point of contention is the refusal to cooperate with Israeli academic or cultural institutions. This action seeks to avoid complicity through a boycott, which is to say: an act of not speaking.

A common argument against the boycott is that while Israel’s actions are condemnable and the struggle against them justifiable, an academic and cultural boycott is misguided because it targets the wrong people and is therefore counterproductive. According to this argument, the boycott affects and excludes the people with whom a constructive, rational conversation is possible: academics, intellectuals, authors, artists. They are the social agents of logos. Indeed, the claim continues, representatives of Israeli academia, culture, and art have engaged in outspoken protests against the Israeli government. Protesters are the least suitable targets for a boycott, since they are the ones who speak out and refuse to remain silent, and are thus the least complicit.

However, invoking protests as an argument against the boycott is problematic. One issue concerns the distinction between protesting individuals and their compliant statist or state-funded institutions, which are the declared targets of the official boycott campaigns.¹ I want to critique the common assumption that protesting and speaking out necessarily make one less complicit than one who remains silent.

Hope for a Coming Word

Commonsense understanding holds that in the domain of speaking, the principal actor is the speaker who utters the words constitutive of the perpetrator’s discourse, such as ideological speech, political statements, and militant slogans. In contrast, the counter-actor is the protester who speaks out against the perpetrator’s discourse: the demonstrator, the oppositional op-ed writer, the dissenting blogger. Finally, complicity consists in remaining silent—in refraining from speaking out.

This classification of speech acts can be found in a traditional Jewish source, the Babylonian Talmud. A famous talmudic story begins with an assembly of rabbis who discuss their situation as subjects ruled by the Roman Empire. “Rabbi Yehudah opened and said: ‘How pleasant are the actions of this nation [the Romans]! They have made streets, they have built bridges, they have erected baths.’ Rabbi Yosei was silent. Rabbi Shimon responded and said, ‘All that they made they made for themselves; they built marketplaces to set harlots in them; baths to rejuvenate themselves; bridges to levy tolls for them.’” (TB Shabbat 33b). The text clearly distinguishes between the speaker who supports the imperial order, the protester who is a dissident soon to be sentenced to death, and the one who remains silent, a figure in between, complicit.

One classic post-Holocaust poetic expression of this understanding is the confessional speech by the German Lutheran pastor Martin Niemöller, Als sie kamen, “First They Came.” Of its many versions, the one reproduced on a wall at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC reads:

“First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.”

The original German does not contrast “I did not speak out” with “no one left to speak for me.” Rather, it contrasts “ich habe geschwiegen,” i.e. “I kept silent,” with no one left to “protestieren,” “protest.”

The silence of Germans who refrained from speaking out against Nazism after 1945 was also understood as ongoing complicity. This was an arguably even more incriminating silence, since demonstrating opposition was no longer dangerous. One famous case is the philosopher Martin Heidegger, who after the war refrained from any public show of remorse, critical reflection, or assumption of responsibility for National Socialism and the role he himself notoriously played in it, inter alia as the rector of Freiburg University. In 1947, one of his former students, Jewish critical theorist Herbert Marcuse, wrote to him: “Many of us have long awaited a word from you, a word that would clearly and finally free you from such identification [with Nazism], a statement that honestly expresses your current attitude about the events that have occurred. But you have never uttered such a word at least it has never emerged beyond your private sphere.”¹ Twenty years later, Paul Celan ended his visit to Heidegger’s Todtnauberg hut “with a hope for a coming word in the heart.”

“Let Us”

But does silence always mean complicity? Does speaking out always lessen one’s implication? To better reflect on these questions, we should think about the nature of speech as an act. A common perception considers speaking, first, as an individual act, and second, as the least of acts or even as the epitome of non-acting. Talking, from this perspective, is not doing; words are just words, not yet actions. “When you have to shoot, shoot, don’t talk,” goes the famous line from The Good, The Bad and the Ugly. On the other hand, speaking might be considered the original individual act. Speech is arguably the individual person’s first intentional, volitional intervention in the world. The Bible portrays speech as the act of creation. God’s words—“let there be light” (Gen 1:3)—create nature, while civilization is created by human words—“let us make bricks” (Gen 11:3).