When Good Slogans Go Bad (Or, Legitimate Slogans as Taunt)

A friend forwarded me an interesting story about an incident at an Evanston, Illinois high school where two school employees (one a teacher) wore a "free Palestine" t-shirt on October 8 -- one day after Hamas' horrendous massacre of Israelis on October 7.

To me, this is obviously deeply troublesome behavior. One reason, which I want to bracket for now, is that it was overt political expression by authority figures in a school setting -- in the story, the aggrieved parents state that they think similar shirts would be equally problematic if they said "MAGA" or "re-elect Biden" or, for that matter, "I support the IDF".

But leave the issue of authority and power out of it for now. Why is "free Palestine" problematic in this context?

This sometimes gets debated as a matter of whether "free Palestine" is "inherently" antisemitic, that is, antisemitic in all contexts. To that I think the answer is clearly no. But, it seems equally clearly, there are circumstances where "free Palestine" is antisemitic -- for example, if it is graffitied on the wall of a synagogue. That's antisemitic, and antisemitic in a way that goes beyond the possibility that any graffiti on a synagogue ("Go Bears!") is antisemitic insofar as it palpably disrespects a Jewish house of worship. In context, "free Palestine" on a synagogue wall is distinctly targeted at the synagogue as a Jewish institution in a way "Go Bears" isn't.

Mostly, when I make both of the above points, I get agreement. Not always -- some argue that "free Palestine" is always antisemitic; some argue that "free Palestine" on the synagogue is not antisemitic (it's criticism of Israel -- just like a firebomb!). But mostly. So why do I view the Evanston incident as more like the graffiti than the "bare" slogan?

My intuitive answer is that wearing a shirt with that slogan on October 8, one day after the Hamas massacres, will be perceived and will reasonably be perceived by Jewish students as taunting -- if not an outright expression of support for the murder of Jews, then at the very least an intentionally defiant stance of opposition to caring about the murder of Jews. The best analogy I can think of would be wearing, the day after the George Floyd murder, a t-shirt saying "I support our Boys in Blue." Is that sentiment inherently racist? No. Is it racist in that particular context, where it is almost certainly meant to stand in defiant opposition to caring about a murder carried out at the hands of the police? Yes, it is.

In the above example, I also thought about using a "Thin Blue Line" flag as the illustration. The reason I didn't is because many people would say that this symbol is inherently racist (whether the day after George Floyd or any other day). But it's worth dwelling on why. The semantic meaning of "Thin Blue Line" may simply be another variation of "I support our police." But in context, that slogan was developed solely as a reactive response to Black Lives Matter; its adaptation is systematically meant to serve as a taunting refusal to care about minorities murdered by police. For that reason, it is different-in-kind from "I support our Boys in Blue" -- but only because it was designed in all cases to carry the context that "I support our Boys in Blue" only contingently does. I don't think "Free Palestine" is like "Thin Blue Line" in that it was designed solely to be used as taunt. Unlike "Thin Blue Line" (but like "I support our Boys in Blue"), it has legitimate uses where it's communicating "normal", in-bounds politics. But in the situations where it is being used as a taunt; as a way of defiantly saying "your pain and marginalization mean nothing to me," then it's antisemitic in the same exact way and for the same reasons that "Thin Blue Line" is racist.

The other example that came to mind was the time when a Texas Republican legislator responded to a planned day of political lobbying by Muslim constituents by conspicuously placing Israeli flags in her office. Is displaying an Israeli flag "inherently" Islamophobic? No, it isn't. But to reduce the legislator's bigotry to the question of whether there's something inherently wrong with ever displaying an Israeli flag is to badly miss the point. In context, the flag was displayed as an intentional taunt -- a way of signaling "you're not welcome here."

In the Texas situation, I wrote about the terrible semiotic spiral that can result when people use otherwise valid symbols and slogans this way -- the more they're used as means of signaling exclusion, the more that bigoted and offensive meaning overtakes and displaces the valid political signification that others may still want to use, but now are obstructed from doing. That is, the more often in a given context or space an Israeli flag is displayed, or "free Palestine" is uttered, as a way of trying to taunt outsiders and send the message they're unwanted, the harder it is for people who want to wave Israeli flags or assert "free Palestine" in a "legitimate" fashion to successfully do so (since, in many cases, the taunting and legitimate usages will be observationally equivalent).

The sheer pettiness of the action -- as if an Israeli flag scatters Muslims like Vampires and the cross -- masked a deeper evil: the politician, by using the Israeli flag in this way, was constructing a meaning of the flag where one of its uses is to signal "I don't want Muslims to be comfortable here". That's terrible.

Likewise, when people expressly respond to, say, Jewish presence or trauma or marginalization by becoming more likely to say "free Palestine" or wave a Palestinian flag, it similarly accelerates this semiotic decay. 

What we saw in Evanston, in other words, while most obviously a terrible injury inflicted on Jewish students, was also in a more roundabout way an act of disrespect to all those who say "Free Palestine" and do not at all mean it to be a taunt, or a way of degrading or diminishing Jews, or a way of signaling to Jews that they're lesser. Both of these are tragedies. And pointing out that tragedy does not depend on, and is not obviated by falsifying, the contention that "free Palestine" is inherently antisemitic.

UPDATE: As Benjamin Lewis pointed out in the comments, October 8 was Sunday, so it is likely the shirts were worn October 9 (Monday). Given the time differences and all, that still is functionally one day after the massacres, and I don't think it makes a substantive difference in the analysis, but I do want to be accurate.