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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
Palestinians are the latest chic cause on campus. Now American Jews are trying to brand criticism of Israel as anti-Semitic -- and even un-American.
Sep 30, 2002 | On Sept. 18, the conservative Middle East Forum launched Campus Watch, a Web site designed to "monitor and gather information" on academics who are not sufficiently pro-Israel. There are "dossiers" on eight professors of Middle Eastern studies, six of them Arabs. Since appearing on the list, all have been deluged with hostile e-mail and one has been threatened by phone. There's also a page on Campus Watch for students to submit complaints about their teacher's pedagogical treason. The project is designed, says Middle East Forum director Daniel Pipes, to push ideas that are "outside the bounds of mainstream discourse" off college campuses. His message to professors of Middle East studies: "Be careful. You should behave yourself."
Pipes' enemies list is one of the latest firefights in the battle over the Middle East that's being waged with passionate intensity on campuses across North America, and it's further evidence of how nasty and polarized the debate has become. Colleges might be the ideal place to hash out the myriad entangled issues and competing narratives of the impossible Israeli situation, but all too often, the loudest voices belong to partisans on each side trying desperately to shut each other up. With depressing predictability, political tragedy abroad has metastasized into petty culture war in the schools.
The human rights disaster in the occupied territories is the latest radical chic cause, and some college activists have mobilized against the Israeli occupation by setting up mock checkpoints and Palestinian graveyards on campus, donning kafiyehs with all the histrionic self-righteousness of '60s students draping themselves in the Viet Cong flag. Meanwhile, a few Jewish students and professors declare that critiquing Zionism is tantamount to bigotry, and neoconservatives have seized on Sept. 11 to excoriate tenured fifth columnists, their longtime bêtes noires. Speakers on both sides of the issue have been driven from campuses; partisans on both sides have gotten death threats. Anti-Semitic violence is up; so are baseless accusations of anti-Semitism. While Campus Watch claims that pro-Israel, pro-American voices are silenced by a professoriate steeped in p.c. Marxism, the most passionate critics of the Israeli occupation are also finding themselves unwelcome at some universities.
The day after Campus Watch was launched, Harvard president Lawrence Summers denounced calls for the university to divest from Israel as anti-Semitic. Following a Sept. 9 student riot that prevented former Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu from speaking at Montreal's Concordia University, the administration imposed a moratorium on Middle East-related political activity, canceling a speech by the left-wing anti-Zionist Norman Finkelstein. At SUNY New Paltz, the administration has denied a women's studies conference funding for the first time in 15 years because of the politics of the keynote speakers: Dr. Ruchama Marton, president of Israel's Physicians for Human Rights and a passionate critic of Israeli policy, and Palestinian writer Nadia Hijab. The University of South Florida is trying to fire computer science professor Sami Al-Arian for his pro-Palestinian activities, claiming a think tank he headed fronted for terrorists.
It's a battle to make the political correctness standoffs of the 1990s seem positively decorous, and one that brings all sorts of volatile issues to the fore, including the meaning of anti-Semitism, the role of the university and the validity of the theoretical Third-Worldism that dominates much undergraduate education.
Rashid Khalidi, an Oxford-trained University of Chicago professor who is one of Campus Watch's targets, calls Pipes and his associates "intellectual thugs." They're "bitter at the fact that their extreme views are not shared by most people in the field," Khalidi says, "and they're taking revenge ... They don't want to have certain things said. They want to make sure the people who try and say them are intimidated."
Khalidi is not wrong. To the people behind Campus Watch, the current conflagration in the Middle East is an opportunity to try to undo the trends that have dominated scholarship for the past three decades. Universities, Pipes believes, should be the helpmeet of the state, rather than its chief critic. "The university as a bastion of adversarial culture is something we take issue with," he says. Instead, he says, it should "be pulling its weight in helping the country."
