On October 7th, 2023, mere hours after the world learned of the indiscriminate butchery of hundreds of Israelis by Hamas fighters, the Palestine Solidarity Groups at Harvard published a hastily written statement.

We, the undersigned student organizations, hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence. Today’s events did not occur in a vacuum. For the last two decades, millions of Palestinians in Gaza have been forced to live in an open air prison… In the coming days, Palestinians will be forced to bear the full brunt of Israeli violence. The apartheid regime is the only one to blame.

The statement provoked a controversy that hasn’t since abated. To the degree that a reasonable, measured objection to the statement emerged, it was that it was unacceptably equivocal about the butchery of Israeli civilians, which it referred to only as “today’s events,” before moving on to enumerating Palestinian suffering at Israeli hands. The consequence projected from its equivocation was the licensing of future massacres of Israelis. But, two years and tens of thousands of lost Palestinian lives later, what should really be called out is how badly the Harvard PSG’s statement backfired on the people it was intended to serve. The Israeli reprisal it foretold still came to pass in spades, and the idea of American universities teeming with ‘Hamas sympathizers’ was aggressively exploited by Israel to justify the bloodbath in Gaza as necessary for the survival of Jews in a world hostile to their existence. We can’t know if the situation in Gaza would have played out differently without the contributions of Ivy League student groups, but it now seems that their expressions of “solidarity” were no less harmful to actual Gazans than if they had amplified calls for Israel to “open the gates of hell” on them. The property of the Hamas attack that seemed to matter to the objective, reasonable critic of the Harvard PSG was that it was carried out against victims viewed as sympathetic by the critic, when what really mattered was how the losses were perceived by not-at-all objective Israelis with the means and now provocation to kill Palestinians. The least helpful thing for preventing the creation of many more victims was further provocation.

This lesson suddenly becomes important in the wake of the Charlie Kirk assassination. As Charlie Kirk was no innocent murdered in his bed, it has seemed that those who consider themselves his political enemies have felt no moral compunctions about publicly expressing ambivalence about his slaying. I will confess to feelings of ambivalence myself. My lizard brain growls that the assassination, while not justified, ought to teach MAGA the lesson that the pain of Trumpism can’t remain contained to just MAGA’s intended victims. I find myself agreeing that there was some ironic justice in the vocal gun control opponent being killed by a gun. And I chafe at the Trump administration’s imposition of national mourning rituals, as if the nation has somehow been united by his loss. In a normal world, it feels to me, the slaying would be just another instance of gun violence between a bigot on the fringe and the kind of audience that attention-seekers on the fringe recklessly invite. It would not really register as political violence at all. Conversely, in a normal world, the slaying of a politician that mattered, regardless of their party affiliation, would prompt unequivocal and genuine solemn feelings.

But in normal times we wouldn’t be potentially sitting on a powder keg, waiting for a spark. Between the Harvard student activists choosing to use October 7th to speak truth about Israel-Palestine and public intellectuals on the left who feel it crucial at this moment to speak truth about Charlie Kirk, an important difference is that the students knew that the “gates of hell” were threatening to open on Gaza, and chose provocation anyway (remember, they were just college students). Unlike the Netanyahu regime, I don’t believe that the Trump administration has an interest in an escalation of domestic political violence, and thus am grateful they took over the news cycle with a controversy over their censorship of Jimmy Kimmel. I am not confident that this “misstep” was not a fully intended to retain control of the situation. In my own state of Washington, a MAGA former state legislator concluded on Facebook that the Kirk assassination means “the democrat party as a political organization needs to be terminated, destroyed, outlawed” and we just don’t know what it would take for elements on the far right to turn this kind of extreme rhetoric into violent action.

In international diplomacy, there are protocols for responding to the death of a noteworthy personage in a foreign adversary, whose purpose is to diffuse the instability of the event. The protocols are detached from the character and public rhetoric of the adversary, to provoke neither invitations to propagandize nor accusations of disrespect. We need protocols, rituals, and habits around political violence that help the non-violent center hold under extreme polarization and the power of an illiberal regime eager for excuses to tighten its grip on power.

It should begin by emphasizing to our young people that acts of political violence like political assassination aren’t just violations of our political norms, they are a gift to authoritarians and our adversaries. In an environment where Trumpism is violating one political norm after another, a ‘norm-breaking’ framing risks sounding like an invitation to “even the playing field” by preemptively breaking the violence taboo, as one only suckers refuse to violate. Instead, we should point to how Kirk’s assassination only amplified his message by giving his followers a martyr to lionize, and creating a temporary vacuum that is likely to be filled by a successor who will be deeply revered for courageously taking on the (demonstrably) dangerous work of carrying out Kirk’s legacy. Simultaneously, a regime like Trump’s gets an excuse for a crackdown on dissent and extremists have a justification for reprisals on innocents. The more widely the sheer stupidity of an assassination like Kirk’s is understood, the less likely it is to occur even under conditions of extreme mutual hostility. The more widely it is understood to be widely understood, the harder it is to pin rogue instances of political violence to a whole class of people, supposing that proving “evil” and “stupidity” requires somewhat independent cases.

The rebounding nature of political violence means we have good reasons to grieve its occurrence, no matter the character of the victims. That, in turn, can rob national expressions of mourning of their power as tools of propaganda and symbols of domination. Every American community should just preemptively treat any assassination of non-criminal political figures as a grievous injury to the nation and the security of all its people, one worth mourning with the kind of pomp we currently afford to the passing of worthy national figures, but out of respect for the event, not the person.

As for the person, we should all treat slain domestic political enemies as if they were foreign adversaries and we were diplomats, neither speaking ill of them nor praising. We should restrict discussions of responsibility for the violence to only what is necessary to be certain it is an isolated incident, and not an ongoing threat. The first rule would have preempted the eulogizing of Kirk by Ezra Klein, which, however gracious, invited such rebuttals as Ta-Nehisi Coates’s (however accurate). The second would have prompted Jimmy Kimmel to think twice before his inflammatory labeling of Kirk’s killer as the right’s own.

Diplomatic tongue-biting is technically much more difficult in the legislature, where the adversary can force you to vote on eulogies they wrote. The Republican majorities in both chambers of Congress just sprung this trap for the Democrats, in the form of ceremonial resolutions tying condemnation of political violence to celebrations of Kirk’s “contributions to political discourse.” The ninety-six “no” and “present” votes from Democrats were predictably used by the White House to describe the Democratic Party as captured by a ‘radical fringe’ unwilling to condemn political violence. The trap would lose its power under a broad cultural understanding that condemning political violence has to trump all else to protect the innocent from the results of escalation, and that unanswered eulogies for bigots are a bitter pill one doesn’t have to swallow often when assassination of even the worst bigots is unequivocally condemned. The minority leadership in the House missed the opportunity to establish this precedent by letting the members vote their conscience on the resolution, instead of demanding a disciplined, unanimous approval.

The left’s habit of treating the calling out of racism and other forms of bigotry as the ultimate moral duty runs deep. I hope that it doesn’t take devastation like what has been visited on Gaza to lead to a broad realization that respectful silence is sometimes the best way to protect what’s worth fighting for.