Widely acclaimed novelist Zadie Smith is under fire from left-wing literary readership—the same crowd that has made up her fanbase for years—for an essay she published in The New Yorker yesterday in which she attempted to push back against Palestine protestors. Celebrated liberal writers Stephen King and Margaret Atwood have also been getting attacked for their positions on Palestine in what is shaping up to be a cannibalization of left-wing luminaries by their own side.
In her essay, Smith attempted to take a middle road between the two camps of Zionists and decolonialist pro-Palestinians, arguing that the issue is nuanced. At the same time, she held that the war must end, and that Israel is to blame for much of the violence. “One state, two states, river to the sea—in my view, their views have no real weight in this particular moment,” she wrote, saying the main objective should be a ceasefire above all else, which she wagered is the objective of the protestors, too.
Nevertheless, Smith criticized some Palestine protestors for wanting to dismantle the Israeli state. “The more than seven million Jewish human beings who live in the gap between the river and the sea will not simply vanish because you think that they should,” she wrote. “All of that is just rhetoric. Words. Cathartic to chant, perhaps, but essentially meaningless. A ceasefire, meanwhile, is both a potential reality and an ethical necessity.” She continued to say that the October 7th attack was a “brutal mass murder,” but then also called the subsequent months of Israeli bombing campaigns “brutal mass murder (at the time of writing) of a reported fourteen thousand five hundred children.”
Her argument was centered around the rejection of the labels used by both sides of the protests: “In these constructed narratives, there are always a series of shibboleths, that is, phrases that can’t be said, or, conversely, phrases that must be said.” Because of Israel’s “long and complex history,” she reasoned, language is very important here, and blanket terms are particularly misleading. She said she cannot be accused of merely being a writer obsessed with semantics in this case. “This would normally be my own view, but, in the case of Israel/Palestine, language and rhetoric are and always have been weapons of mass destruction,” she wrote.
She tried to preemptively couch her essay in humility, saying her “personal views have no more weight than an ear of corn in this particular essay,” and only “the dead” she mentioned in it have weight.
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But this did not work. Left-wingers across social media platforms made fun of her for “bothsidesism” and excoriated her for daring to have anything but condemnation for Israel. They also attacked her for failing to subscribe wholesale to the politics of decolonization (which would eventually result in the unraveling of the United States).
“I feel like Zadie Smith uses black aesthetics to conceal her deeply pedestrian white middle-class politics,” wrote @fatumakhaireh, a graduate student in “global creative and cultural industries” at the SOAS School of Arts. “People see the head wrap and the earrings made of kente cloth and confuse that for something more substantive.”
I feel like Zadie Smith uses black aesthetics to conceal her deeply pedestrian white middle-class politics. People see the head wrap and the earrings made of kente cloth and confuse that for something more substantive pic.twitter.com/fbteNgpIuq
— (◡‿◡✿) 🇵🇸 (@fatumakhaireh) May 6, 2024
Another user, @fatimazsaid, screenshotted Zadie’s article and displayed it alongside posts from Stephen King and Margaret Atwood, denouncing all three stalwarts of the liberal literary establishment as “moralising ivory tower bellends” who inadvertently “show[ed] their a**es,” i.e. revealed themselves to be members of the “imperialist capitalist” class and insufficiently woke.
Zadie Smith has absolutely everyone’s goddamn number in this deranged culture of fandom-as-politics pic.twitter.com/DzfSSusUap
— Kat Rosenfield (@katrosenfield) May 6, 2024
A writer based in Jerusalem, Mohammed El-Kurd, called the piece “pretentious and navel-gazing” and said he is “sick of ignorant and tone-deaf writers who feel like they can lecture us from their lavish homes.”
Zadie Smith argues that protest slogans are “weapons of mass destruction” in a new pretentious and navel-gazing article and she does it while a literal genocide ravages Gaza. I am sick of ignorant and tone-deaf writers who feel like they can lecture us from their lavish homes.
— Mohammed El-Kurd (@m7mdkurd) May 5, 2024
A radical postcolonial Cambridge University scholar named Priyamvada Gopal, who has spent her career savaging the legacy of the British Empire, argued that Smith can be understood as a non-white woman who attended Cambridge out of a desperate wish to be admitted into “elite white literary and institutional circles.” (It is unclear why, if this is true, Gopal has been allowed to work there.)
I am not quite sure why people are shocked or surprised. This IS the price of admission into elite white literary and institutional circles.
— Priyamvada Gopal © (@PriyamvadaGopal) May 6, 2024
“You have to understand Cambridge English, & those who taught her,” Gopal wrote in one of her ten follow-up posts. “Their long & frankly asinine elevation of a particular narrow brand of ‘literariness’, pitted against the ‘too political’ (mapping on to insufficiently white).”
“I trembled–my hands are still shaking –as I read her shitty New Yorker piece,” she wrote in another. “It’s horrific in its own right but it just put me right back into years of having that barbed wire cutting your skin everywhere you go.”
Another user, @Thamina_F, shared a piece by Gen Z trans culture critic Andrea Long Chu titled “How Zadie Smith Lost Her Teeth.” Passages Thamina provided from the essay, published by New York Magazine‘s sub-site The Vulture in September 2023, see Long Chu criticizing Smith’s past comments praising President Barack Obama’s biracial identity (which she shares) as it allowed him “to see a thing from both sides.” Long Chu argues this foreshadowed Smith’s embrace of the practice of “refram[ing] all political questions as “human” ones.” She went on: “The truth is that Smith herself struggles to think in groups of two or more; her habit of sympathizing with the least sympathetic party in any given situation frequently drives her to the political center.”
Replying to her own post, Thamina wrote: “All the receipts are coming out,” linking to another post digging up old comments Smith made about the Irish Troubles that were being interpreted as another instance of bothsidesism.
If you want to know why Zadie Smith is two-siding a genocide after 8 months of indefensible bloodshed, Andrea Long Chu nailed it in How Zadie Smith Lost Her Teeth:https://t.co/WZN38tMmkA https://t.co/C52rFGrolA pic.twitter.com/zCBQ7QgZ71
— Thamina Eff 🇵🇸 (@Thamina_F) May 5, 2024
The denunciations of Smith go on, and on, and on…
To Zadie Smith's attention. pic.twitter.com/gOV2obOxR3
— Carlos Azevedo (@cprazevedo) May 6, 2024
I pass Zadie Smith every morning on the school run and will now wear my watermelon sweatshirt and my keffiyeh and carry a picture of Refaat Al Areer and tell her “it’s complicated”.
— Monisha Rajesh 🍉 (@monisha_rajesh) May 5, 2024
Lot of people (including herself) think Z Smith is defending liberalness and humanism and even liberal humanism when she’s really defending the position of being an unbothered bourgeois subject
— noah kulwin (@nkulw) May 6, 2024
Zadie Smith claiming that the words of children protesting genocide are 'weapons of mass destruction', and you know, not the actual weapons of mass destruction used by Zionists to murder people is utterly repulsive, indefensible, and purely evil. Good grief, what a fraud
— Anita Zsurzsan 🇵🇸 ✡️ (@iamjourjean) May 5, 2024
Israelis: We are dealing with human animals, spear no woman and child. We want to annihilate everyone in Gaza now.
College protesters: We want Palestinians to live with freedom and dignity
Zadie Smith: these are the same language— Anita Zsurzsan 🇵🇸 ✡️ (@iamjourjean) May 6, 2024
No one needa more than a handful of simple words to say why they support Palestine.
'Children are mass murdered'
Or
'Everyone deserves freedom and dignity'
Should do it.But when people try to explain why they support Israel, you get what Zadie Smith does in the New Yorker: a… pic.twitter.com/yiHyOTcSEN
— Alon Mizrahi I without equality there's no freedom (@alon_mizrahi) May 6, 2024
Zadie Smith’s essay has confirmed a feeling I’ve had every single day of my life: so many people feel compelled to write about or debate what Palestine is and what Palestinians are. The irony being, they have no idea what they’re talking about. We are real people, human beings.
— Suja Sawafta | سجى صوافطة 🍉 (@sujasawafta) May 6, 2024
Zadie Smith really thought she was being clever here. pic.twitter.com/rdfQwB1zD4
— Sturgeon's Law (@Sturgeons_Law) May 6, 2024
Zadie Smith has always been the High Priestess of coffee-coloured contrarianism. Our literary foremother of Blairite multiculturalism. In her aggressively specific lane, she excels. Outside of it, not so much.
— momtaza mehri 💆🏾♀️ (@RuffneckRefugee) May 5, 2024
One post summed up the underlying force at play behind the entirety of the reception. “zadie smith’s position is actually the same as most of our quietest, big-brained, very sophisticated colleagues in the university, who think that articulating a (consequential) political position is a sign of naïveté, stupidity, even boorishness.”
zadie smith's position is actually the same as most of our quietest, big-brained, very sophisticated colleagues in the university, who think that articulating a (consequential) political position is a sign of naïveté, stupidity, even boorishness.
— Esmat Elhalaby (@thaqafatalhind) May 6, 2024
What is happening here is nothing short of the downfall of the Obama-era literary establishment, which has been instrumental in legitimizing and propagating the ideologies of third wave feminism, postcolonialism, democratic socialism, and race studies, all of which have come to be colloquially referred to as “wokeism.” Smith, who was no doubt at least partially elevated to her rank due to the fact that she is a “woman of color,” is now literally having her status as a “person of color” removed by the pseudo- academic mob due to her refusal to condemn Israel (and America, the UK, and all “western colonialism” as an extension). Meanwhile, if she were to forcibly condemn Israel, she would likely lose access to the world of higher education dinners and fancy literary symposiums.
The current Israel-Palestine war may become something much more than the latest missile-trade between these two common belligerents. Particularly because of the way the left has used the war to mobilize their new discourse of decolonization, it may be the wedge issue that finally ends the Obamaculture. That it could be replaced with something far worse is certainly a possibility, but I wonder if the left will have fragmented its power bloc too greatly to be able to recuperate the loss, leading to the rise of a right-leaning literary culture—or, as Jerry Seinfeld recently put it, to total “disorientation.”
Shane Devine is a writer covering politics and business for VT and a regular guest on The Unusual Suspects. Follow Shane’s work here.
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