Six observations about the US campus protests
JVL Introduction
Peter Beinart, acute as usual, makes a number of generalisations about the campus protests in the States:
- The most important political dynamic is that among non-Jewish non-Palestinian progressive students, not among either Jewish or Palestinian students
- The students who are most likely to be involved in the pro-Palestine activism are among the least privileged on campus (very different from the anti-Vietnam war protest)
- On many campuses there is a kind of intra-Jewish ideological civil war. The majority of the white people in the protest movement appear to be Jews.
- There is a struggle in these universities between the liberal arts parts of the universities, overwhelmingly undergraduates, who are pro-Palestinian, and some of the business, medical, and professional schools, often post-grad.
- A particular kind of discourse that Beinart is hearing among the protesters includes the chant, “settlers, settlers go home, Palestine is ours alone”.
Beinart is disturbed by this. While not thinking it antisemitic – these protest movements are totally willing to embrace Jews who embrace the anti-Zionist cause – he finds it “a kind of dehumanizing language when it comes to Israeli Jews, a kind of Manichean worldview that basically sees the world as oppressors and oppressed, and sees Israeli Jews—all of them—as the oppressors, as colonists”.
It does not “hold a lot of space in its heart for the humanity of Israeli Jews” which he finds very against the spirit of leading Palestinian intellectuals like Edward Said and now Rashid Khalidi.
RK
PS: Your web editor can only find five of the promised six observations of the title…
This article was originally published by the Beinart Notebook on Mon 6 May 2024. Read the original here.
Six observations about the campus protests
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It is an disturbing, albeit ambiguous picture and it is right to address it . How are the settlers going to change to the extent that their neighbours could feel safe alongside them? We have all heard the argument from the extreme right that all Gazans are somehow guilty. I’ve listened to, and argued with, Middle Eastern Arabs who insist , with more basis in reality, that all Israelis are brought up to serve in the IDF and fire weapons at Palestinians with a guarantee they will get away will it. Dear settlers – they see your children as their murderers – an existential threat. You want rid of them, you want rid of them, you want rid of them and no level of projection and prevarication and bullshit can disguise this. At last the rest of the world sees it – but how can this mentality be addressed? How can this population be persuaded to abandon their fascism? I don’t think it will happen till the subsidies end, the supply of weapons ends, the politicial and propaganda cover ends, serial liars in politics the media have their careers terminated, or are prosecuted, and all who have committed atrocities on the ground are prosecuted and punished. Until all of the above parties cease escalation and are absolutely bricking it, no-one could feel safe alongside the criminals they have been protecting.
So, the students don’t measure up to the urbane and sophisticated Edward Said, friend of Barenboim, grandson of a wicketkeeper on the school honours board? (Furthermore, what would Said have made of Gaza now?)
Perhaps some of them have read too many copies of Haaretz and realise that for every Levy or Hass there are thousands who want to “finish them off.”
Or they may even have read the next piece chosen by JVL in this sequence and begin to realise that nothing shields you from the ordinary contempt reserved for Palestinians.
“The case of Professor Shalhoub-Kevorkian illustrates the centrality of Zionism as a supremacist ideology in all aspects of civil life in Israel — even within its supposedly liberal institutions. It also exemplifies the policy of racial silencing and the meticulous, concerted effort to frame all Palestinians, even a prominent scholar, as a national threat.”
How does one remain in a state that privileges one’s ethnic/religious identity – vilifying and persecuting one’s neighbours – and still be able to convince outsiders what a good neighbour one would make?
That’s not cricket by anyone’s definition.
I wish we could distinguish between Zionism as a justification for an apartheid government, and Zionism that designates Israel as a place where anyone of Jewish ethnicity can go as of right, as a refuge from current or future antiSemitic persecution.
Israel could have a ‘jus sanguinis’ that allows for the right of return, and at the same time make all citizens equal before the law, once they have attained citizenship. This arrangement is in force in many countries round the world at the present time.
When asked whether I am in favour of Israel’s right to exist, my personal reply is always ‘yes, but not as an apartheid state’.
That said, the priority now is to simply stop the Israeli government from committing war crimes in Gaza. The first step must be to press Western governments to stop enabling them to do this by sending arms. When Russia slaughtered Ukrainian civilians, we took sweeping sanctions against them. When the Israeli armed forces committed similar acts, we rewarded them. This is sheer hypocrisy.
In 1986 a satirical song ‘I’ve Never Met a Nice South African’ which originated with the TV series ‘Spitting Image’ was released as the B side of a record. At the time South Africa was a pariah state due to its treatment of its non-white population. No one complained it ‘dehumanised’ South Africans, because no one took it literally. Everyone knew that there were white people who objected to the apartheid system just as we know that there are people in Israel who object the settlements in the West Bank and the systematic destruction of Gaza. For more about the song see Wikipedia.
Hitherto people have been inclined to see Jewish Israelis as a bit lazy and complacent and happy to enjoy their privilege without thinking too much about its origins; pretty much like the global West in general, in fact. From this angle the objective has been to spread information in the hope that as people understand the situation better they will come to see that it is intolerable.
The explosion of open support for apartheid and genocide within Israel has come as a complete surprise to almost everyone. It appears that at least a substantial body of Israelis (and some of their allies, in the USA and Germany in particular) understand exactly what has been done to the Palestinians, really like it and want to see more of it. I think that even the severest critics of Israel have been taken aback to see how much worse things are than they thought.
It has been generally understood that whatever the solution to the Israel/Palestine issue it must involve two communities agreeing to live together in peace and mutual respect. Looking at the present political leaders in Israel, who seem to enjoy majority support, it is hard to imagine them living in peace and mutual respect with anyone. Inevitably this has revived questions about the fundamental legitimacy of the state of Israel.