Statement Fever

AS THE HORRORS MOUNTED in Israel and Palestine, in America we did what we do best: We issued statements. Then we found fault with those statements and issued new statements.

- SAM ADLER-BELL

At Harvard, a coalition of pro-Palestine student groups signed a statement holding Israel "entirely responsible" for Hamas's attack before its full and horrific dimensions could even be known-and before administrators had managed to issue their own statement, which, in turn, proved too neutral for dozens of pro-Israel faculty members, who published an open letter, prompting another statement from Harvard's president, Claudine Gay, which more explicitly condemned Hamas's "terrorist atrocities." Similar cycles of statement and restatement played out at NYU, Stanford, and Indiana University.

The situation became so fraught at Williams College that its president, Maud Mandel, announced she would no longer be making any statements on any domestic or international matters. "I have become convinced that such comments do more harm than good," she said. "They support some members of our community in particular moments while intentionally or unintentionally leaving out others. They give some issues great visibility while leaving others unseen"

But it wasn't just college campuses. Statements rushed in from every corner, from politicians and business leaders; from brands and celebrities; from professional sports franchises, venture-capitalist firms, and labor unions. Every new statement was an opportunity for scrutiny, for dissatisfaction, for rancor. Even ordinary people, I noticed, seemed to adopt the rhetorical tics of statementese, as if their social-media posts, too, were being written by committee, in consultation with crisis managers, calculated to assuage several constituencies: "My heart goes out to ..." "While I strongly condemn ..." 

"Two things can be true at once..." "We here at Sam Adler-Bell's Twitter account..." And when these statements, inevitably, were found wanting, we condemned them too.