The ASA: Where Foolishness and Ignorance Collide. By Walter Russell Mead. The American Interest, December 17, 2013.
Mead:
Anti-Semitism is not absent from the BDS
movement. But there’s a lot more going on here than mere bigotry.
The
American Studies Association, a group of nearly 5,000 professors of the
subject, has voted by a large margin to boycott all Israeli institutions of
higher education, the New York Times reports. The path of the Boycott, Divest
and Sanctions movement (BDS) is not exactly paved with significant victories,
but the ASA, which apparently prides itself on its deep understanding of
academic freedom and the details of
international law, is very confident of its resolution’s importance:
“The
resolution is in solidarity with scholars and students deprived of their
academic freedom, and it aspires to enlarge that freedom for all, including
Palestinians,” the American Studies Association said in a statement released
Monday.
The
statement cited “Israel’s violations of international law and U.N. resolutions;
the documented impact of the Israeli occupation on Palestinian scholars and
students; the extent to which Israeli institutions of higher education are a
party to state policies that violate human rights,” and other factors.
Interestingly,
in a more-Catholic-than-the-Pope development, the ASA’s position on Israel is
well to the left of that of the Palestinian Authority. The guild of scholars so
sensitive and attuned to the goings-on in Palestinian life apparently missed
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s desperate entreaty to BDS
groups to stop boycotting Israel. The
Times of Israel reported Friday:
“No, we
do not support the boycott of Israel,” the Palestinian leader told a group of
South African reporters on Monday. “But we ask everyone to boycott the products
of the settlements. Because the settlements are in our territories. It is
illegal. […]
“But we
do not ask anyone to boycott Israel itself,” he reiterated. “We have relations
with Israel, we have mutual recognition of Israel.”
Perhaps
we should next expect these brilliant scholar-activists to boycott the PA for
its despicable collusion with the Zionist Entity.
The ASA
is hardly an organization whose pronouncements shake the earth, and its boycott
resolution probably won’t join the Balfour Declaration and PLO Charter in the
Arab-Israeli conflict’s pantheon of defining documents. But because it typifies
a certain type of empty intellectual posturing on a complicated issue and
because both supporters and opponents of the BDS movement engage in some
over-the-top rhetoric about resolutions of this type, it is worth thinking
about the support base for the kind of anti-Israel resolution that so many
academics longing to feel cutting-edge about something seem to be drawn toward.
Before
doing that, I ought to make my own position on this clear. I have long believed
in the right of the Jewish people to self-determination and see the State of
Israel as the embodiment of that right. I believe that the Palestinians have an
equal right to self-determination and that the Palestinian state needs to have
sustainable frontiers and, on the West Bank, territorial contiguity. Further,
I’ve argued in print and in electronic media that the key reason that so many
negotiations over the two state solution have failed is that Americans in
particular have not paid enough attention to what Palestinians need to gain to
make such a solution viable. I have been on record for about thirty years in
print saying that I don’t think that settlements are a good idea and have said
so more than once to Israeli officials. I think that the cease fire boundaries
that existed until 1967 do not constitute viable permanent boundaries for
either people and that a final agreement on territory would include mutually
agreed on swaps and adjustments. I participate in academic exchanges and
activities with both Israeli and Palestinian institutions.
Speaking
personally, I don’t boycott. I’ve met with representatives from both Hamas and
Fatah over the years in Gaza, on the West Bank and in Beirut. I’ve also met
with Israelis on all points of the political spectrum there, including radical
settlers in and around Hebron. Globally, as a journalist and a scholar, I’ve
met with all kinds of people whose viewpoints I find objectionable. I’ve had
dinner with Fidel Castro, I’ve interviewed neo-Nazi skinhead thugs in the
former GDR, I’ve visited North Korea and met with officials of that regime.
(I’ve never broken US law on these trips, by the way.) I did stay out of South
Africa until the first majority elections had been held, but would have met
with officials or scholars representing the old regime had there been some
reason to do so, as I have met with scholars from Iran and with officials of
Hezbollah. I am on the board of the New America Foundation, an organization
that has come under criticism when one of its senior fellows invited the
controversial author of a book very critical of Israel to speak. I neither
resigned from that board nor criticized the event. When Brandeis University
recently canceled its cooperation agreement with Al-Quds, a Palestinian
university where students held a demonstration in support of the terrorist
organization Islamic Jihad, I supported the decision of Bard College, where I
teach, to continue our relationship based on the facts as we understood them. I
may not always succeed, but it is my intention and my goal as a scholar and a
writer to provide a consistent defense of intellectual freedom and to promote
the ideal of free exchange of ideas.
All
this is to say that I instinctively reject the idea of broad brush boycotts for
scholars, policy organizations and journalists. I don’t like ‘appropriate
speech’ codes in universities; I oppose laws punishing people for Holocaust
denial; I am one of those people who believe that free speech and the free
exchange of ideas are important even when people disagree with me profoundly.
Given
all this, it can hardly be surprising that I think the pontificators and
poseurs of the ASA should go soak their heads after such a foolish vote. But
despite my visceral dislike for what I can’t help but see as a fundamental
betrayal of the basic ideals of the intellectual life, I do think that some
critics of the resolution are being too tough on the poor ASA.
The core
of the criticism (other than the point that intellectual blockades and boycotts
are inherently wrong) is that since the ASA has singled out Israel for special
treatment even though there are many worse human rights violators in the world
demonstrates that the ASA is a nest of ugly anti-Semites.
This
criticism is partly true. Even by the strictest measures, Israel is by no means
the worst human rights violator on this sad planet of ours and the
Palestinians, despite their entirely legitimate complaints, are not the worst
treated people alive. Muslims in Burma, many Tibetans, just about everyone in
North Korea, and the hundreds of millions of enslaved bonded workers in the
Indian subcontinent all endure greater injustices and deprivation in their
daily lives than the mass of the Palestinian people. Yet Israel clearly gets a
disproportionate weight of global disapproval for what it does. We’ve frequently
noted on this blog that even when it comes to the suffering of the
Palestinians, there’s a tendency to focus one-sidedly Israeli actions and to
minimize the injustices Palestinians experience at the hands of Arabs from the
Gulf to Egypt (which keeps its borders with Gaza firmly closed), not to mention
the systemic and ugly discrimination against Palestinians in Lebanon.
So the
ASA, like a lot of other hotheads around the world, comes down like a ton of
bricks on Israeli wrongdoing while turning a blind eye to other, worse
misdeeds. Anti-Semitism, pure and simple, say some.
It
isn’t that simple and it isn’t that pure. There are, I have no doubt,
anti-Semites both conscious and unconscious in the ASA, and their dark hearts
rejoiced when this boycott was proclaimed. I have no way of estimating their
numbers; anti-Semitism is a sickness of the soul and like racism, it is
embedded in the cultural structures of our society in ways that can sometimes
be hard for people to recognize or understand. There are all kinds of people
who claim to be free of all prejudice but who are convinced that “the Jews”
control the media, control the banks, control American politics or whatever.
Just like people can be warped by racist cultural assumptions and stereotypes
without being consciously aware of being prejudiced or even consciously wishing
in any way to be associated with the evils of racism, people can be
unconsciously shaped by the way our cultural surround has been warped through
centuries and even millennia.
But
anti-Semites, knowing or unknowing, are just part of the picture. Besides
actual anti-Semitism—of which, again, there is still quite a bit—there are four
other sources of support for these unbalanced resolutions.
The
first group that gets madder at Israel than at other countries with worse human
rights records is left-leaning American Jews. This is complicated. It’s natural
and even commendable to hold friends and kinfolk to a higher than normal
standard, and because Judaism historically has insisted on high ethical
standards in human conduct, it’s easy to see how some Jews who disagree with
Israeli policies would feel compelled to take a strong and public stand. For
many of these Jews, criticizing Israeli policies and even voting for
resolutions like the ASA loser isn’t being self-hating or anti-Jewish or even
anti-Zionist. It is about standing up for what they see as the true and
necessary idealism of the Jewish people and upholding the honor of Jewish
values. These people also often believe that in taking these stands they aren’t
supporting anti-Semitism—they think they are fighting it by showing the world
that not all Jews support the crimes of Israel, and perhaps by showing their
fellow scholars in left leaning academic enclaves that not all Jews should be
tarred with the Likud brush.
A
second group of supporters for these ASA style resolutions is made up of people
(usually westerners) who don’t really understand the historical roots and
cultural realities of Israel. This group (and American Jews are often among
them) sees Israel essentially as a western country that should know better than
to do the kinds of reprehensible things a country like the Netherlands would
never do. Because Jews have played such a significant role in the development
of freedom and the open society in the western world, many westerners see
Israel as a western transplant in the Middle East. And because they see
Israel’s existence as a consequence of (or reparation for) the Holocaust in Europe,
they think the Jewish state is basically a nation of ethnic and cultural
Europeans.
This
is, of course, sheer ignorance. Israel’s population today is not an offshoot of
the west. Demographically, Israel is a Middle Eastern country today; millions
of Jewish refugees from Arab countries like Iraq, Syria, Egypt, and from all
over the Maghreb now make up fifty percent of Israel’s population. These
Israelis can often combine the political and cultural attitudes found in the
Arab world with the special bitterness that comes not only from exile, but from
having your sufferings ignored and even despised. (Palestinian refugees from
Israel get infinitely more sympathy and support from the international
community than Jewish refugees from Arab countries ever do.) Including the
large number of Israeli immigrants who came originally from Russia and other
countries in eastern Europe and the Balkans, a large majority of Israelis have
no roots in the western world and the ancestors of most present day Israelis
never spent a day of their lives in democratic countries until they got to the
embattled Jewish enclave in the Middle East. Seventy percent of Israel’s
population today comes from the old lands of the Ottoman Empire and Russia
rather than from Western Europe.
Israel
isn’t an underachieving Denmark; it would be more accurate to say that it is an
overachieving Turkey or a miraculously liberal and tolerant Lebanon. However,
lots of people in the west don’t know as much about Israel as they think they
do and so they are sincerely surprised and offended by Israeli actions that
they assume (perhaps condescendingly) are “normal” when developing countries do
them. Israelis themselves aren’t completely guiltless in this confusion; it has
sometimes suited the purposes of Israeli diplomacy to play up its western
roots. However, ignorance about Israel mixed with arrogance and condescension
about the perceived political immaturity of non-western societies around the
world is a leading cause of resolutions like the ASA folly.
The
third group is the Palestinians themselves. It’s not anti-Semitic for a
Palestinian to be angrier at Israeli misbehavior than, say, at Pakistan for its
appalling record of mistreating religious minorities, or China for its
treatment of the Tibetans. It’s a natural human tendency to be angrier at the
people whose actions affect you most directly than at people whose misdeeds
only affect people you don’t know.
Finally,
there’s a fourth group in the mix: people who are not Palestinians themselves
but for various reasons make a strong and emotionally charged connection
between the Palestinian cause and some issue that touches them personally. For
many non-Palestinian Arabs, the sufferings of the Palestinians are both a sign
and a cause of Arab oppression. A Tunisian or a Libyan may not have any
personal experience of Israeli wrongdoing, and may have lived under an Arab
government that actually oppressed all of its citizens in ways Israel could
never emulate, but the existence of a Jewish state in the Middle East can still
feel like a deep personal and national affront.
Beyond
the Arabs, many Muslims also see the rise of a Jewish state (again, often
wrongly seen more as a west European implant than as the demographic mix that
it is) as both the consequence and a sign of western arrogance and disdain for
Muslims and their history and values.
And
beyond the Muslim world, there are many people who see the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict as one more episode in the western world’s conquest and domination of
non-western peoples. Zionism is seen as a form of colonialism, and the Jewish
settlers in the Middle East are seen as the latest incarnation of the French
settlers in Algeria, the white settlers in Rhodesia and South Africa, and so
on. Some of these are people who come out of countries with histories
profoundly shaped by ugly colonial experiences, some are westerners trying to
cope with the difficult legacy of colonial history. But to the degree that the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict has come to serve as a symbolic stand-in for
colonialism and resistance to it, across the developing world and on trendy
western campuses, there’s a sincerely felt if often poorly reasoned sense that
to pass anti-Israel resolutions today is like passing anti-apartheid
resolutions a generation ago.
It
would be wrong to confound all these very different points of view with
anti-Semitism, but it would also be wrong to say that anti-Semitism doesn’t
sometimes mix in with these other points of view. The human heart is crooked
above all things, and disentangling all the various strands that go into a
particular person’s actions at any given time is a task best left to Almighty
God.
What
goes on in a leftist hothouse like the ASA is a kind of witches’ brew of these
various forms of anger: often unconscious anti-Semitism expressing itself as
disproportionate anger at Israel; feelings of anger and the need of American
Jews to take what they see as an important moral stand against Israeli
behavior; the efforts of pro-Palestinian activists, often operating as part of
an organized campaign, to score points; and a healthy dose of arrogant
ignorance mixed with anti-colonialism of various degrees of seriousness and
sincerity.
Other
than the anti-Semitism it’s all very understandable, but a professional body
that lets itself be dominated by these kinds of concerns doesn’t do itself much
good. Sometimes the critics of these sanctions efforts go too far themselves,
and dismiss the whole complicated mess as a simple episode of anti-Semitism run
amuck. What’s happening is much more complicated, but the more I look at the
half-baked anti-Israel resolutions the trendy left keeps proposing, the more
confident I am that academic country boycotts and campus speech restrictions are
two excellent examples of things this world can do without.
Comment by Shahar Luft:
“But to
the degree that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has come to serve as a
symbolic stand-in for colonialism and resistance to it, across the developing
world and on trendy western campuses, there’s a sincerely felt if often poorly reasoned
sense that to pass anti-Israel resolutions today is like passing anti-apartheid
resolutions a generation ago.”
That’s
probably the core, if there is any. But is that not antisemitism? When Israelis
are compared to European settlers in Africa, the subtext is really “you don't
belong here,” which is exactly what Arabs tell us in private conversation when
they’re sincere. After all, some African dictatorships were a lot worse in
objective terms than the old SA, but still it attracted more odium because it
was perceived in some way as not belonging,
However,
Jews heard this “you don’t belong” not only from Palestinian Arabs. They heard
it throughout their history from more or less everyone. Our history is not one
of imperial expansion. It’s one of subservience and persecution, and the
constant allegation that we are strangers; that we do not relate organically
and authentically to the environment, do not work on the land, are not attuned
to the natural rhythm of the host countries, that our tongues do not easily
roll their languages, that we follow alien gods that rule a different heaven
than the one visible from the meadows of the Ukraine or the casba of Baghdad.
So
where the political narcissists see a guerilla fighter, we see a Cossack. Where
they see Nelson Mandela, we see Adolph Hitler. They think they’re liberators,
we think that they are – essentially – bigots who repeat every slander and lie
that was hauled at us.
