When Complicity Becomes a Weapon

The case of Pilar Rahola is not only about Pilar Rahola. It is about what happens when a democratic society begins to translate political interpretation into criminal suspicion, and when the word “complicity” is stretched until it no longer describes participation in violence but disagreement with a required moral vocabulary.

Rahola, the Catalan journalist, writer, and long-time defender of Israel, is a polarizing figure. She is sharp, theatrical, combative, often excessive, and certainly not the kind of public intellectual who hides behind the furniture of neutrality. Yet the complaint now directed against her in Barcelona is not merely another episode in the ordinary quarrel over Israel, Gaza, Zionism, and European moral posturing.

According to recent reports, the Barcelona prosecutor’s office has opened preliminary proceedings after a complaint accusing Rahola of incitement to hatred and complicity in genocide. The complaint concerns her public rejection of the claim that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, her defence of Israel’s war against Hamas and its sponsors, and statements in which she allegedly minimized or challenged some of the claims made about Israeli actions and Palestinian casualties.

This must be stated carefully. A preliminary investigation is not a conviction, and it is not even proof that a prosecutable offence has occurred. Yet the fact that such language can enter the legal field at all tells us something important about the present European atmosphere.

The central danger is the expansion of complicity. Traditionally, complicity refers to those who help plan, finance, command, arm, execute, conceal, or materially assist a crime. In the new moral climate, however, the term is increasingly pushed toward those who interpret a conflict wrongly, refuse the approved vocabulary, defend the wrong side, or decline to say “genocide” when the surrounding atmosphere demands that word.

This shift is not a technical detail. It marks a movement from responsibility for action toward responsibility for narrative alignment. Once that movement becomes normal, the public sphere is no longer a place where arguments confront one another; it becomes a field of admissibility, where certain words must be spoken before one is even allowed to enter the conversation.

There is, of course, such a thing as propaganda. There is such a thing as language that dehumanizes, prepares, excuses, or normalizes violence. No serious person should deny this, because the twentieth century taught us at unbearable cost that words can make killing easier, remove faces from victims, and turn civilians into abstractions.

But there is also another danger. The accusation of propaganda can itself become a weapon for ending disagreement. If every morally offensive defence of Israel becomes complicity in genocide, then the law no longer protects human beings from incitement; it begins to protect a political vocabulary from challenge.

This distinction matters. Direct incitement to violence must be taken seriously, and speech that clearly dehumanizes a protected group can be dangerous. But the claim that a journalist is complicit in genocide because she rejects the word “genocide” in describing a continuing war is a much larger and more dangerous step.

Even in Europe, where certain forms of denial or grave trivialization of legally established genocides have been restricted, there should be a clear line between denial of a paradigmatic crime such as the Shoah and disagreement over the legal and political description of an ongoing war. That line is not a luxury of liberal decorum. It is one of the conditions that prevents criminal law from becoming a machine for disciplining interpretation.

Rahola’s conversation at the Jewish Community of Barcelona is useful precisely because it reveals the terrain of the dispute. She did not speak as a detached analyst. She spoke as someone convinced that Israel has not only survived the war but altered the strategic structure of the Middle East by damaging Iran’s regional architecture, weakening Hezbollah, devastating Hamas, and opening a new path for the Abraham Accords.

One may find this analysis persuasive, excessive, premature, or morally incomplete. One may argue that Rahola’s optimism is too triumphant, that Gaza cannot be treated as a small detail inside a grand regional map, and that civilian suffering is not a public relations inconvenience but a moral fact. All of that can and should be argued.

But argument is not prosecution. If Rahola has made false claims, they should be answered with evidence. If she has minimized Palestinian suffering, that minimization should be exposed; if she has spoken with cruelty, the cruelty should be named; and if her defence of Israel becomes blind to the human cost of Israeli power, that blindness should be challenged without hesitation.

This is precisely what democratic debate is for. It allows us to say several things at once: Hamas is a jihadist organization; Iran’s regional project has been destructive; Jewish communities in Europe are again being made to feel unsafe; Palestinian civilians are not rhetorical debris; Gaza is not merely a theatre of military necessity; and Israel, because it is a state and a democracy, must be judged by standards that cannot be suspended by grief.

The tragedy of the present moment is that too many people want only one of these sentences. One side wants “genocide” to be the first and final word, after which every defence of Israel becomes moral obscenity. The other side wants “antisemitism” to be the first and final word, after which every criticism of Israel becomes an attack on Jewish existence.

Both gestures close thought. They are not symmetrical in history or consequence, but they are symmetrical in function. Each turns moral language into a gate that admits the faithful and expels the impure.

Rahola’s strongest point in the Barcelona conversation was not that everyone must agree with Israel. Her strongest point was that, once terms such as “genocidal,” “murderer of children,” “terrorist state,” or “new Hitler” are imposed at the beginning of the discussion, the discussion has already been destroyed. What remains is not debate but denunciation.

She called this mechanism reductio ad Hitlerum. The phrase may be old, but the mechanism is now everywhere. When an opponent is converted into Hitler, one does not need to answer him; one only needs to denounce him. When a state is converted into pure Nazism, one does not need to analyze its war, its enemies, its legal obligations, its failures, its civilian casualties, its hostages, its strategic dilemmas, or its internal fractures.

This is not thought. It is excommunication. It replaces the difficulty of judgment with the comfort of absolute moral placement.

The same mechanism exists in other forms. When every Palestinian voice is suspected of being an alibi for terrorism, debate also dies. When all Israelis are reduced to settlers, all Zionists to supremacists, all Palestinians to Hamas, or all European Jews to agents of a foreign state, language has already ceased to distinguish.

The problem, then, is not only hatred. The problem is the collapse of distinctions. Democracies do not die only when people say monstrous things; they also decay when societies lose the ability to distinguish between error, cruelty, propaganda, incitement, demonization, and criminal participation.

This is why Rahola’s invocation of Spinoza was more important than it may first appear. She said that the great legacy of Spinoza is doubt: the human capacity to ask, to question, to resist dogma. In the context of contemporary Europe, this may have been the most serious sentence of the entire conversation.

Spinoza is not a decorative name here. He belongs to the difficult Jewish-European history of excommunication, reason, heresy, and intellectual courage. To invoke him in this context is to defend the possibility that truth cannot be administered by collective emotion, and that moral seriousness begins not with slogans but with the discipline of asking better questions.

A young person says: “This is genocide.” Can one still answer: “Think for two minutes”? Can one still ask what the legal threshold is, what evidence is required, how intent is distinguished from consequence, and how one separates extermination, siege, negligence, vengeance, military necessity, proportionality, and catastrophic urban warfare?

A supporter of Israel says: “This is only self-defence.” Can one still answer: “Think for two minutes”? Can one still ask what self-defence permits, what it forbids, and what victory means if the destruction of a military enemy leaves behind a civilian world broken, displaced, hungry, and politically unformed?

If these questions cannot be asked, public life is no longer thinking. It is chanting. The slogans may differ, but the rhythm is the same.

Rahola is right that the Jewish condition in Europe often functions as an early warning system. When Jews begin to ask whether they can remain visible in European cities, something is wrong not only with Jewish security but with the democratic body itself. Antisemitism is rarely only about Jews; it is a fever indicating a deeper illness in the political imagination.

Europe should know this better than anyone. It knows what happens when public language prepares violence, and it also knows what happens when states decide which speech is permissible in the name of moral protection. Its history contains both the crime of incitement and the crime of administrative control.

That is why the Rahola case is so troubling. Europe’s familiar temptation is to convert tragedy into procedure, guilt into regulation, anxiety into files, and moral crisis into prosecutorial management. It does this with great solemnity, often with the clean face of virtue, and sometimes with the catastrophic innocence of institutions that believe paperwork can purify history.

This temptation should be resisted. Not because Gaza does not matter, and not because Palestinian suffering can be minimized. It should be resisted because the criminal law should not become the instrument by which political interpretation is disciplined.

There are speech acts that incite violence directly. There are speech acts that dehumanize a group with unmistakable danger. There are speech acts that participate in persecution, and a democracy must retain the ability to respond to them.

But a democracy must also distinguish such acts from political advocacy, even when that advocacy is harsh, partisan, offensive, or morally incomplete. If that distinction collapses, everyone will eventually be processed by the same machine. Today it may be a pro-Israel journalist accused of complicity in genocide; tomorrow it may be a Palestinian writer accused of glorifying terrorism because he refuses the vocabulary of Western diplomacy.

The machine will not care. It only needs a new target and a morally charged file name. Once “complicity” becomes an all-purpose accusation, it will not remain under the control of those who first deploy it.

The Israeli side should also learn something from this moment. It is not enough to shout “antisemitism” whenever European institutions move against pro-Israel voices, although antisemitism is often present and sometimes obvious. The more serious task is to defend disciplined distinctions: criticism of Israel must remain possible, demonization of Jews must be resisted, and criminal prosecution must not become a substitute for intellectual defeat.

This distinction is fragile, and precisely for that reason it matters. It allows one to defend Israel’s right to fight Hamas without treating every Palestinian death as an unfortunate footnote. It allows one to condemn Hamas’s use of civilian space without using that fact as a solvent that dissolves every Israeli responsibility.

Rahola ended her conversation with an idea that deserves attention. She said that peace is not the highest value; life is. Sometimes, she argued, defending life means losing peace, because a people threatened with destruction cannot preserve itself through beautiful formulas alone.

This is a profoundly Jewish formulation, but it is also a dangerous one if detached from limits. Life must be defended, and Jewish life has too often been abandoned by those who later wrote elegant condolences. Yet the defence of life must not become permission to stop seeing the lives of others.

That is why public debate must remain open. Only open debate can hold both truths together: Israel has the right and the duty to defend Jewish life, and Palestinian life is not a secondary category of human existence. The first sentence is not cancelled by the second, and the second is not cancelled by the first.

The accusation against Rahola may go nowhere. It may be dismissed, forgotten, or absorbed into Spain’s overheated political theatre. But symbolic episodes matter, because they reveal what a society is becoming willing to do.

What Europe must not become willing to do is transform the outer boundary of political speech into a criminal frontier whenever the moral atmosphere becomes unbearable. That would not produce truth. It would produce obedience with legal footnotes.

The answer to bad speech is not always prosecution. Sometimes the answer is sharper thought, better evidence, colder analysis, and the courage to resist the tribe that demands immediate verbal submission. Sometimes the most democratic word is not “yes” or “no,” but “distinguish.”

We should not let outrage write the penal code. We should not let “complicity” become an all-purpose weapon. And we should not confuse justice with the administration of permissible speech.

By Yochanan Schimmelpfennig