The attack on Israel by Hamas on 7 October 2023 and Israel’s military response have led to horrific violence and to an intense political and discursive polarization that has exacerbated several rhetorical flashpoints, including the objectification of Jews and Muslims in public media, the precarious status of Jewish and Palestinian scholars, the complexities of Middle East politics, and the difficulty of taking a rhetorical position of reconciliation in the midsts of violence. On college campuses, demonstrations against the war have left both Jews and Palestinians in the community feeling harassed and unsafe. The protests have been met with a backlash against students, faculty, and university administrators by members of the public and by legislators, often on free speech grounds. Many of those who recognize the complexities of the situation and feel pressured to take sides end up self-censoring. The situation has made serious response difficult, at the very moment when responsive, productive scholarship is necessary.

The pursuit of justice and the challenge of addressing violence have been central to modern rhetorical theory since its revival in the wake of World War II, when scholars such as Kenneth Burke, Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca grappled with how rhetoric might serve as an alternative to force and how argumentation might prevent future atrocities. They sought to develop approaches to rhetoric that could help communities reason together about values and justice while recognizing human plurality and difference. This seems especially relevant now as academic communities struggle with competing claims about justice and security, and with questions about when speech itself constitutes violence. This session advances recent scholarly discussions about how rhetorical theory can inform productive dialogue in highly polarized contexts where traditional approaches to civil discourse and deliberation may prove insufficient.

As with the Hamas attack in southern Israel on October 7^th, 2023, and the unimaginable Israeli violence in Gaza that followed, the “unimaginable,” argues Abraham, frames the contemporary moment as one of unrelenting atrocities. The presentation will work through how the repeated use of atrocity’s evocative companion terms (“genocide,” “war crimes,” “settler-colonialism,” “atrocity,” “ethnic cleansing” and “complicity”) deadens the individual’s critical capacity to make crucial distinctions between victims and perpetrators, ultimately treating peoples as monoliths, and will analyze the flattening and destructive effects of this rhetoric of condemnation, while also exploring how to restore possible visions of co-existence.

Taking a comparativist approach, Frank’s paper argues that both Jewish and Palestinian rhetorics have the potential to achieve peace with justice between the two peoples. As exemplified by Arendt, Magnes, and contemporary movements like Peace Now and Standing Together, Jewish rhetorics recognize Palestinian trauma and the right to equality. Similarly, Palestinian rhetorics, as advanced by Khalidi and Said, emphasize reconciliation and mutual recognition of historical traumas as the only viable path forward. Ayman Odeh, a Palestinian Member of the Knesset, presents a rhetorical map in a speech on March 31, 2015, that honors Jewish and Palestinian rhetorics of entente, and serves as a cry for equal citizenship for Israelis and Palestinians. Frank’s presentation offers a rhetorical analysis of Odeh's speech as a potential blueprint of an effective rhetoric of rapprochement.

Antisemitism in the context of human rights protest today often goes unrecognized as antisemitism by those who perpetuate it. Progressive activists intending to draw attention to injustice have increasingly relied upon and reproduced right-wing antisemitic tropes, stereotypes, and narratives that both threaten Jews and undermine social justice missions. The tropes, narratives, and stereotypes of Jew-hatred, as well as its rhetorical uses, are similar across the political spectrum. Recognizing that political discourse is increasingly – and dangerously – divisive, a heuristic is necessary to recognize the similarities in antisemitic discourse on the political right and left. Grayson’s paper draws upon rhetorical content analysis of a corpus of texts from English-language sources across the political spectrum to explore those similarities.

Focusing on the effects of the events on and after October 7^th in American colleges and universities, Bernard-Donals’ presentation argues that institutional positions of neutrality in the wake of campus unrest in response to the violence in Gaza were designed to tamp down statements of sympathy from administrative units, but they have also had the effect of chilling speech rather than protecting it. The paper examines the demonstrations and campuses’ responses to them as instances of rhetorical violence, and how neutrality works against a rhetorical sense of urgency, the call to deliberation, and serves as a form of rhetorical violence against the very premise of rhetoric: to discursively engage with and open oneself up to others.