When Critique Becomes a Category

Recently, my teacher and friend Professor Shaul Magid published a Substack essay titled “Deflection Hasbara: Internalizing Blame to Justify the State” (you can read it here: https://shaulmagid.substack.com/p/deflection-hasbara-internalizing). It’s a piece that deserves to be read carefully, not skimmed, because it raises a genuinely important and uncomfortable question:

What happens when a community internalizes its own public-facing narratives to the point that they shape how it understands reality itself?

Magid suggests that “hasbara”—often understood as outward-facing advocacy—can become inward-facing as well. It can function not just as messaging, but as a kind of reflex: a way of framing events that preempts critique, softens moral tension, and keeps certain questions from fully surfacing.

There is something incisive here.

Communities do this. All communities do this. We develop narratives that protect coherence, identity, and survival. We learn what can be said easily, what must be qualified, and what cannot be said at all. Over time, those habits don’t just guide how we speak to others—they shape how we think.

And in moments of crisis, those habits can harden.

So yes: there are times when Jewish discourse about Israel can function defensively. There are moments when language becomes a buffer rather than a bridge, when complexity is managed rather than engaged, when moral discomfort is redirected rather than faced.

That critique should not be dismissed.

But I want to suggest that the framework itself—“deflection hasbara”—risks becoming too total.

When a category is applied too broadly, it stops illuminating and starts flattening.

Not every effort to contextualize is deflection. Not every attempt to complicate a narrative is avoidance. Sometimes it is exactly the opposite: an effort to hold multiple truths at once in a situation that resists simplification.

And this is where I find myself wanting to widen the lens.

Because if we are going to talk about internalization, we cannot limit that analysis to one side of the conversation.

The same dynamics Magid identifies—narrative reinforcement, moral certainty, rhetorical closure—also exist in activist and academic frameworks that critique Israel. Terms like “settler colonialism,” “genocide,” or “ethnonationalism” are not neutral descriptors floating above the discourse. They carry their own conceptual weight, their own histories, and, at times, their own forms of closure.

They too can function as totalizing frames.

They too can shape what can be said and what cannot.

They too can preempt complexity.

If “hasbara” can be internalized, so can critique.

Which raises a deeper question: how do we distinguish between deflection and discernment?

At what point does resisting a particular framework become evasion—and at what point is it actually a refusal to accept a category that feels incomplete, imprecise, or morally distorting?

These are not easy questions. But they matter.

Because we are living through a moment in which language itself has become a central arena of struggle. Words are doing enormous work—sometimes too much work. They are standing in for arguments, for moral positions, for entire worldviews.

And increasingly, we find ourselves arguing about the words rather than the realities they are meant to describe.

What begins as a moral conversation about human suffering, responsibility, and political possibility can quickly become a debate over definitions. The terms become the terrain. The conversation narrows. And the people most affected by the conflict recede into abstraction.

This is not unique to one side.

It is a structural feature of the discourse itself.

Which is why, as much as I appreciate the critique Magid offers, I find myself wanting to press further—not in opposition, but in extension.

If certain forms of language function as deflection, what forms of language allow for genuine moral engagement?

If we strip away the reflexive narratives—whether defensive or accusatory—what is left?

Can we speak concretely about harm without collapsing into totalizing categories?

Can we affirm the dignity and self-determination of both Jews and Palestinians without immediately triggering ideological sorting mechanisms?

Can we create a discourse that does not require us to choose between moral clarity and conceptual humility?

These are not rhetorical questions. They are, I think, the real work.

Because critique alone is not enough.

Diagnosis is not the same as direction.

Naming a problem in discourse does not automatically generate a better one.

And so while I am grateful for Magid’s willingness to name something many would prefer to leave unexamined, I also think we need to be careful not to let the critique itself become another closed system—another category that explains everything and therefore risks explaining too much.

The goal is not simply to identify deflection.

The goal is to recover a way of speaking—and thinking—that keeps us in honest relationship with reality, with one another, and with the moral stakes of this moment.

That kind of language is harder.

It resists slogans.

It resists totalizing frames.

It leaves room for discomfort.

But it may also be the only kind of language that can hold the possibility of a future that is not already predetermined by the words we choose today.