Columbia and
the Academic Intifada
Commentary Magazine
July 2005
Since its
birth in 1948, Israel has faced down numerous attempts to destroy it or
undercut its right to exist. War, terrorism, economic and diplomatic ostracism,
UN resolutions, media vilification, not to mention the spread of anti-Semitic
libel, have all taken their toll. Recently a new, seemingly more confined but
no less difficult challenge has been added: an effort to harness the perceived
moral and intellectual force of professional scholars in the campaign to
de-legitimize the Jewish state.
I am not just speaking of the anti-Israel and anti-Jewish
campaign that erupted on Western campuses simultaneously with the launch of the
Palestinian terror war in September 2000, and that intensified as Israel took
steps to contain it. To this has been added classroom denigration of the state
of Israel and its supporters, and even open advocacy of its destruction.
Last April’s decision by Britain’s 48,000-strong Association of
University Teachers (AUT) to boycott Haifa and Bar-Ilan universities is the
most obvious example of this latter phenomenon. The decision, subsequently
rescinded in the face of an international outcry, had nothing to do with
scholarly considerations: Israel is the only Middle Eastern country where
academics enjoy complete and unrestricted freedom of expression. Nor did it
reflect an honest sense of solidarity with the Palestinian universities of the
West Bank and Gaza, which for the past decade have been under the control not
of Israel but of the Palestinian Authority (PA). Rather, the boycott was a
frank attempt to single out Israel as a pariah nation, to declare its existence
illegitimate. As the Haifa academic Ilan Pappe, whose (false) claim of
persecution by his university provided the pretext for the boycott, pleaded
with the AUT on the eve of its resolution:
I appeal to you today to be part of
a historical movement and moment that may bring an end to more than a century
of colonization, occupation, and dispossession of Palestinians. . . . The
message that will be directed specifically against those academic institutes
which have been particularly culpable in sustaining the oppression since 1948
and the occupation since 1967 can be a start for a successful campaign for
peace (as similar acts at the time had activated the anti-apartheid movement in
South Africa).
In other words, Israeli scholars were to be ostracized not for
any supposed repression of academic freedom but for their contribution to the
creation and prosperity of the state of Israel, a racist, colonialist implant
in the Middle East as worthy of extirpation as the former apartheid regime of
South Africa. With this as the boycott’s goal, small wonder that one of its
prime movers, Sue Blackwell of Birmingham University, posted a picture on the
web of herself wrapped in the Palestinian flag and headlined “Victory for the
Academic Intifada.”
Still, however despicable such efforts by open Israel-haters,
most of whom claim no knowledge of Middle Eastern affairs, it pales in
comparison with a far more insidious development in the field of Middle East
studies itself, the training ground of future scholars, opinion-makers, and
policy experts. Here the textbook example is the department of Middle East and
Asian Languages and Cultures (MEALAC) at Columbia University in New York, whose
faculty members have been plausibly accused by students of abusing their
positions in order to vilify Israel, to promote anti-Zionism, and to stifle
free discussion of the Arab-Israeli conflict.
In the
fall of 2004, the David Project, a Boston-based advocacy group, produced a
video titled Columbia Unbecoming. In it, various students
recounted their personal experiences of classroom bias and intimidation. Three
professors came in for particular criticism.
Hamid Dabashi, the head of MEALAC, was accused of, among other
things, canceling classes to attend, and to permit his students to attend, a
pro-Palestinian rally on campus that featured a call for Israel’s destruction.
George Saliba, who teaches Arabic and Islamic science, allegedly told a Jewish
student in a private discussion that she had no claim to the land of Israel or
any right to an opinion on the Israel-Palestinian question because, unlike his
brown-eyed self, “You have green eyes; you’re not a Semite.” On another
occasion Saliba reprimanded a student who had questioned his habitual
substitution of the term Palestine for Israel, as if to deny the existence of
the Jewish state: “Oh, so that’s the ax that you have to grind? Why Israel is
being called Palestine in my class? What about the plight of the Palestinians?
Why isn’t that what you are talking to me about?”
Students were even more critical of Joseph Massad, a protégé of the late Edward Said. Among the more serious accusations
were Massad’s likening of Jews to Nazis and his disparagement of Israel as a
racist state. Reportedly, Massad taunted one student, who had served in the
Israeli army, “How many Palestinians have you killed?,” and informed another that
he would not “have anybody here deny Israeli atrocities.” One student recounted
Massad’s telling his class, “The Palestinian is the new Jew, and the Jew is the
new Nazi.”
In December, faced with growing public indignation, Columbia’s
president, Lee H. Bollinger, grudgingly announced the appointment of a
committee to review student complaints. The committee’s composition gave a
clear signal of Bollinger’s own disposition. Three of the five members were
known critics of Israel, and two of these three had signed a petition calling
on Columbia to divest its holdings from companies selling arms and military
hardware to Israel. (An anti-divestment petition had also attracted wide
support on campus, but none of the five had signed it.) Another member had
served as Massad’s dissertation adviser, and shortly before being appointed to
the committee had signed a letter decrying press reports about MEALAC’s
prejudice as “the latest salvo against academic freedom at Columbia.”1
In its report, released at the end of March, the committee
predictably circumvented the core issue. Focusing on “significant deficiencies
in the university’s grievance and advising procedures,” it ruled that Massad
had acted inappropriately by responding “heatedly” to “a question that he
understood to countenance Israeli conduct of which he disapproved,” while
consigning to “a challenging gray zone” his taunt about the number of
Palestinians a student had supposedly killed. At the same time, the panel had
nothing but praise for “Massad’s dedication to, and respectful attitude toward,
his students” and for his “willingness . . . to permit anyone who wished to do
so to comment or raise a question during his lectures.” Indeed, so open-minded
was Massad in the committee’s estimation that his “pedagogical strategy”
actually “allowed a small but vociferous group”—presumably, pro-Israel
students—“to disrupt lectures by their incessant questions and comments.”
Adding insult to whitewash, the committee found “no evidence of
any statements made by the faculty that could reasonably be construed as
anti-Semitic.” Above all, it scanted the majority of the complaints, which
centered on none of these matters but rather (as the committee itself noted) on
“what a number of students perceived as bias in the content of particular
courses” as well as on charges that “particular professors had an inadequate
grasp of the material they taught and that they purveyed inaccurate
information.”
All this was too much even for the New York Times, which
had been overtly sympathetic to the Columbia faculty throughout the crisis.
“Most student complaints,” it now editorialized correctly, “were not really
about intimidation, but about allegations of stridently pro-Palestinian,
anti-Israeli bias on the part of several professors.” Since the committee had
failed, in the words of the Times, “to examine the quality and fairness
of teaching,” the university was still left with the need “to follow up on
complaints about politicized courses and a lack of scholarly rigor.”
This at
least cuts to the heart of the matter. The issue is not whether professors
should treat their students with due respect, as indeed they should, but
whether they should be permitted, under the guise of academic freedom, to pass
off personal bias and open political partisanship as scholarly fact. That the
committee avoided this issue is hardly a surprise. For when it comes to honest
scholarship, there can be no question of where George Saliba, Joseph Massad,
and Hamid Dabashi stand.
Massad, for example, who emphatically dismissed the charges
against him as part of a coordinated hate campaign by Israel and its right-wing
supporters in America, recently published a series of articles in the
English-language edition of the prominent Egyptian paper al-Ahram. There
he repeatedly derided Zionism as a form of European imperialism and Israel as
“a racist Jewish state” (or “a racist settler colony”), openly advocating its
replacement “by a secular democratic bi-national state”—the PLO’s shorthand
slogan since the late 1960’s for a Middle East without Israel. Turning the
history of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict on its head, Massad claimed that
“Jewish colonists were part of the British colonial death squads that murdered
Palestinian revolutionaries between 1936 and 1939 while Hitler unleashed Kristallnacht
against German Jews.” Thus, he concluded, “the ultimate achievement of Israel”
was the “transformation of the Jew into the anti-Semite, and the Palestinian
into the Jew.”
Hamid Dabashi echoed Massad’s anger at the “malicious defamation
of my department with no basis in truth” (as he wrote to the Spectator,
Columbia’s student paper). In his own public statements and writings, however,
Dabashi has if anything outdone Massad in concocting a scenario of the Middle
East in which Israel not only has no legitimate place but can hardly be said to
exist, except as an unnamed Dark Force.
“I flew to Palestine and landed in Ben-Gurion checkpoint,”
Dabashi wrote of a brief visit in February 2004 “to four Palestinian cities”:
Gaza City, Ramallah, Nazareth, and Jerusalem (the last two of which are, at
recent report, still in Israel). During his weeklong stay in the country that
“they call ‘Israel,’” the only non-Arab civilians he noted were knots of
ultra-Orthodox Jews “rushing to some unspecified destination.” Nowhere to be
seen in the streets of Jerusalem, evidently, were the Jewish Israelis—men,
women, and children—who constitute the vast majority of the country’s
population. Instead, he found the streets inhabited by heavily armed soldiers “with
very long machine guns hanging from their necks,” as befits “a military base
for the rising predatory empire of the United States.”
Back at the Ben-Gurion “checkpoint” on his return flight to New
York, Dabashi was struck by an airport scene resembling something out of the
pages of Hannah Arendt’s reflections on the “banality of evil.” Before him was
not a departure lounge but
a fully fortified barrack, with its
battalion of security forces treating all the transient inmates with equal
banality. It was not just colored Muslims like me that they treated like
hazardous chemicals. It was everyone. “One,” as in our quintessential humanity,
melted in this fearful furnace into a nullity beyond human recognition.
But his torture was not over; once on line to board the
aircraft, Dabashi was forced to contemplate with horror “a young couple and
their five children, all boys and all with yarmulkes on their heads,” the
mother pregnant, the father “murmuring something under his breath,” the
children “each eating a McDonald’s hamburger. I presume McDonald’s makes kosher
hamburger. I was quite nauseous.”
Only after having finally escaped from this “massive machinery
of death and destruction” to the safety of Manhattan did Dabashi permit himself
a detached scholarly meditation on the origins of so “miasmatic [a] mutation of
human soul into a subterranean mixture of vile and violence.” Where could it
have come from? His answer:
Half a century of systematic maiming
and murdering of another people has left its deep marks on the faces of these
people. . . . A subsumed militarism, a systemic mendacity with an ingrained
violence constitutional to the very fusion of its fabric, has penetrated the
deepest corners of what these people have to call their “soul.” No people can perpetrate
what these people and their parents and grandparents have perpetrated on
Palestinians and remain immune to the cruelty of their own deeds.
Like Massad,
Dabashi found a home for his lucubrations in al-Ahram, a paper that itself
regularly features anti-Semitic articles and cartoons. His thoughts on the
nature and history of Israeli society tell much about the tenor of the academic
department he had the privilege of heading at one of the world’s great
universities. They also prompt a question of their own: where do such ranting
constructions of reality have their origin?
A lengthy historical treatise could be written in answer to that
question, but the first place to look is at the career and writings of Edward
Said, the patron saint of Middle Eastern studies in its current incarnation.
Like Dabashi, Massad, and many others, Said, who died in 2003, made a specialty
of appropriating the experience of the Jews as his own, even while belittling
Jewish collective identity and savaging the Jewish state.
“I don’t find the idea of a Jewish state terribly interesting,”
Said told an interviewer for the Israeli paper Ha’aretz in August 2000.
“I wouldn’t want it for myself. Even if I were a Jew. I’d fight against it. And
it won’t last. . . . Take my word for it. . . . It won’t even be remembered.”
Making his own vision of the future explicit, he added: “[T]he Jews are a
minority everywhere. A Jewish minority can survive [in Arab Palestine] the way
other minorities in the Arab world survived.”
In his published work, Said discounted altogether the historic
Jewish attachment to Palestine and misrepresented Israel’s creation and
subsequent struggle for survival as a predatory colonialist endeavor to occupy
another people’s land and to dispossess the indigenous population. Missing from
his account were such inconvenient facts as the Arabs’ outspoken commitment to
the destruction of the Jewish national cause, the sustained and repeated Arab
efforts to achieve that end from the early 1920’s onward, and the no less
sustained efforts of the Jews at peaceful coexistence. In his account, Zionism
emerged instead as an offshoot of European imperialism at its most rapacious.
As for the Palestinian Arabs, they were Zionism’s hapless victims, “whose main
sin [was] that they happened to be there, in Israel’s way.”
Like his protégé Joseph Massad, Said invoked the
Holocaust only in order to deny the reality of Jewish identity and history. “I
am one of the few Arabs who have written about the Holocaust,” he boasted to Ha’aretz.
“I’ve been to Buchenwald and Dachau and other death camps, and I see the
connection.” But his acknowledgement of the Nazi murder of European Jews was
merely a tactical ploy. As he candidly explained, “by recognizing the Holocaust
for the genocidal madness that it was, we can then demand from Israelis and
Jews the right to link the Holocaust to Zionist injustices toward the
Palestinians.”
Said spared no effort at hammering home that linkage. In the
mid-1980’s, for example, he compared the notion of Jewish statehood with Nazi
Germany’s “organized [program of] discrimination or persecution.” “I do not
want to press the analogy too far,” he wrote in 2002, on the second anniversary
of Arafat’s terror war, “but it is true to say that Palestinians under Israeli
occupation today are as powerless as Jews were in the 1940’s.”
A strange assessment on the anniversary of a Palestinian war
that had already resulted in the bloody murder of some 700 Israelis and the
wounding of thousands more in daily terror attacks. But then, Said was also
quick to dismiss Palestinian terrorism itself as a figment of Israel’s
imagination, “invented so that its own neuroses can be inscribed on the bodies
of Palestinians.” Unhindered by his lack of any professional knowledge of
Israeli society or politics, he indicted Israel as “a country whose soul has
been captured by a mania for punishing the weak, a democracy that faithfully
mirrors the psychopathic mentality of its ruler, General Sharon, whose sole
idea—if that is the right word for it—is to kill, reduce, maim, drive away
Palestinians until break.’”
Although he
mobilized the machinery of post-modernist “discourse” to construct his portrait
of Israeli reality, Said was no more original in his choice of rhetoric than
his acolytes after him. The repudiation of Jewish nationalism has, in fact,
been a staple of Arab propaganda ever since the early 1920’s, was
institutionalized in the PLO Covenant of 1964, and received international
codification in the UN’s 1975 resolution declaring Zionism “a form of racism
and racial discrimination.” Almost as antique is the equation of Zionism with
Nazism and colonialism. Within a year of its creation in 1964, the PLO had
produced a short pamphlet, titled Zionist Colonialism in Palestine,
foreshadowing Said’s “postcolonialist” arguments.
Take, for example, the pamphlet’s description of the birth of
Zionism:
The frenzied “scramble for Africa”
of the 1880’s stimulated the beginnings of Zionist colonization in Palestine.
As European fortune-hunters, prospective settlers, and empire-builders raced
for Africa, Zionist settlers and would-be state-builders rushed for Palestine.
Here is the same idea as rendered in Said’s The Question of
Palestine (1980):
Zionism . . . coincided with the
period of unparalleled European territorial acquisition in Africa and Asia, and
it was as part of this general movement of acquisition and occupation that
Zionism was launched initially by Theodor Herzl.
Or consider the pamphlet’s explanation of the main difference
between Zionism and 19th-century European colonialism:
Unlike European colonization
elsewhere, . . . Zionist colonization of Palestine was essentially incompatible
with the continued existence of the “native population” in the coveted country.
And here is Said:
Zionism was a colonial vision unlike
that of most other 19th-century European powers, for whom the natives of
outlying territories were included [emphasis in original] in the redemptive
mission civilisatrice.
And the Jewish state’s ultimate objectives? According to the
pamphlet, “the Zionist concept of the ‘final solution’ to the ‘Arab problem’ in
Palestine, and the Nazi concept of the ‘final solution’ to the ‘Jewish problem’
in Germany, consisted essentially of the same basic ingredient: the elimination
of the unwanted human element in question.” Said avoids such highly charged
terminology, but his gist is unmistakably the same:
There is, of course, the charge made
by National Socialism, as codified in the Nuremberg Laws, that Jews were
foreign, and therefore expendable. . . . Then there is the almost too perfect
literalization that is given the binary opposition Jew-versus-non-European in
the climatic chapter of the unfolding narrative of Zionist settlement in
Palestine.
Lying propaganda is perhaps to be expected from a revolutionary organization
committed to eliminating by violence a longstanding member of the United
Nations. Its introduction into the college classroom is another matter. But it
is here that Said’s influence has been unrivaled, and well beyond the confines
of Columbia, his own institution. Catapulted to international stardom by his
1978 book Orientalism, a blistering attack on supposed Western
perceptions of the Middle East and Islam, Said used his celebrity status to
blur, if not to erase altogether, the dividing line between political
propaganda and academic scholarship. He was quickly followed by legions of
disciples, many of whom would make their careers in departments of Middle East
studies by consciously patterning themselves on this “Salah al-Din [Saladin] of
our reasoning with mad adversaries,” to quote Dabashi’s perfervid eulogy of his
intellectual hero.
And herein lies the crucial importance of the Columbia case. Far
from being an exception, its classroom teaching is emblematic of the pervasive
prejudice that has afflicted the field of modern Middle Eastern studies for
quite some time.2
That prejudice is fueled in equal parts by money and ideas. We
have seen where some of the leading ideas come from. The money comes from
oil-rich Arab countries that have created endowed chairs or research centers
over which they exercise lasting control. Only last year, Harvard was forced to
return a $2.5-million donation from the United Arab Emirates (UAE) for the
creation of a chair named after the UAE’s ruler, Sheik Zaid ibn Sultan, when it
was revealed (again by student initiative) that an Arab think tank connected
with Zaid was promulgating anti-American and anti-Semitic views. Columbia, by
contrast, went out of its way to hide the UAE’s $200,000 contribution to a
newly endowed chair in modern Arab studies and literature, and then insisted on
retaining the money once the link had been exposed. Fittingly, the chair is named
for Edward Said.
It is difficult to overstate the tenacity of the resulting
infestation of Arab dogmatism in Middle East studies as a field. Over the last
two decades, one would be hard-pressed to find books on the Arab-Israeli
conflict issuing from Middle East-studies departments that present the Jewish
state in a dispassionate, let alone a positive, light, and hardly any such
items appear on course reading lists. Thus, at Columbia, the syllabus for
Joseph Massad’s fall 2004 survey course on the Middle East included, in
addition to readings from the canonical Edward Said and the subtler Orientalist
Albert Hourani, a single work on Israel: a three-decades-old screed by the
French Marxist historian of Islam, Maxime Rodinson, whose title, Israel, a
Colonial-Settler State?, says it all. Scholars daring to defy the general
stigmatization of Israel have been attacked and marginalized.
Above all, the Middle East Studies Association (MESA), the
largest and most influential professional body for the study of the region,
whose 2,600-plus members inhabit departments of Middle East studies throughout
the world, has become a hotbed of anti-Israel invective. Past presidents of the
association like Joel Beinin of Stanford and Rashid Khalidi of Columbia—the
latter holds the Edward Said chair—have, in one form or another, publicly
advocated the destruction of Israel as a state. Joseph Massad won MESA’s prize
for the outstanding Ph.D. dissertation in the field, and the resulting book was
warmly reviewed by three past MESA presidents, not to mention by Said himself.
Given these circumstances, it was only natural for a group of
prominent MESA members to send a letter to Columbia’s president in support of
the beleaguered MEALAC staff, or for the association’s president-elect, Juan
Cole of Michigan, to rush to the aid of Massad—the victim, as Cole put it, of
“a concerted campaign” by “the American Likud.” “In parlous times like the
post-9/11 environment,” Cole stormed, “demagogues grow powerful and American
values are endangered. Massad is the canary in the mineshaft of American
democracy.”
Even if the Columbia leadership were to do the decent thing, by
acknowledging the ongoing bigotry of its professors and by disciplining the offenders,
such action would only address the symptoms and not the causes of the pervasive
anti-Israel and anti-Jewish bias in the field of modern Middle East studies.
Not only is the academic intifada against the Jewish state thriving, the
reigning terms of discussion it has introduced for understanding Middle Eastern
reality have become perfectly normal, perfectly conventional, perfectly
accepted in academic discourse. It will take more than a single student protest
to undo the rot that has settled into the study of the Middle East and that is
now quite comfortably at home in Western universities.
Efraim Karsh is head of Mediterranean studies at
King’s College, University of London. His new book, on the history of Islamic
imperialism, will be out next year from Yale.
1 The best and most dogged reporting on the Columbia affair was
done by Jacob Gershman of the New York Sun.
2 For chapter and verse, see Martin Kramer, Ivory Towers on
Sand: The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America (2002).