Do you want more or less context? That question has been hanging over the public debate for two weeks. Last weekend, Kauthar Bouchallikht announced that she no longer wants to be an MP for GroenLinks-PvdA, because she lacked the necessary ‘context’ about the decades of oppression of the Palestinians in the responses of Jesse Klaver and Frans Timmermans to the Hamas attacks.
For others, there was too much context. Marcel van Roosmalen criticized in a radio column on Tuesday “the shouting for context, the whining, the downplaying of massacres from a distance.” Hans Teeuwen already fulminated against it in a video last week: “Jew haters don’t need any context at all. They hate Jews, and that is why they must die.” And there was also criticism of the context bidders abroad. “Context me no context, analysis me no analyses,” wrote the Jewish historian Simon Schama last Saturday in an emotional article in the Financial Times. He thought it inappropriate to start interpreting while Israel was still in deep mourning.
Subsequently, the context was also maligned in other contexts. When two Swedes were shot dead by an IS terrorist in Brussels on Monday, Mick van Wely, crime journalist at The Telegraphsarcastically: “Curious about the ‘context’.”
The divide over ‘context’ resembles the old debate over who is responsible for inequality: the system (according to the left) or the individual (according to the right). Focusing on the system, or on the context, seems to reduce the moral responsibility of individuals. This is also what the context critics say: context can lead to justification. Marcel van Roosmalen talked in his column about “residents of the Netherlands who beat each other over the ears with history lessons to justify acts of terror.” It was reminiscent of Mark Rutte, who said after the curfew riots in January 2021: “This is criminal behavior. And then we don’t look for deep sociological meanings or causes.” Personally, I never understand why it couldn’t be both: a moral judgment about individual actions, with knowledge of the context. A no brainerit seems to me, but others find this maliciously nuanced.
There is, if you listen carefully, another form of context criticism. This is not about providing context per se, but about the content of the context provided. It is typical that Hans Teeuwen himself talks about thousands of years of hatred of Jews in the video in which he speaks out against context. You see this one-sided context criticism more often. People who believe that the socio-economic background of jihadists does not matter often quote extensively from the Koran to show where that violence comes from – also a context.
Of course, it is best if you can take the different contexts into account – which does not mean that they have to be given equal weight. This week on X, theologian Stefan Paas showed how to do this. He described “two deep wells from which anger and sadness constantly bubble up: the insecurity of Jews and the injustice against Palestinians.” Any look at the conflict that ignores either of the two is inadequate, I think.
I see another problem with context bidding. Often the context only comes into the picture when something terrible has happened. After terrorist attacks in 2015 by men from Molenbeek in Brussels, dozens of journalists went there to understand the ‘problem district’. Something similar is happening now with Gaza. The world briefly lost sight of the plight of the 2.2 million Gazans, as well as the violence faced by Palestinians in the West Bank. Memories worldwide are now being refreshed with Israel/Palestine cards and ‘ten questions about the conflict’. This leads to a lot of fresh outrage about the fate of the Palestinians – not only about the current bombings, but also about their position in general. It is sad but true: without Hamas we would not be talking about this now.
This shows that if you want attention for your case, it pays to commit a gruesome attack. That is the perverse thing about the ‘attack-context’ dynamic. Is that a reason not to provide context – because it would reward the perpetrators? I do not think so. It actually shows that context is needed much more often.