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November 9, 2004
There is a post over at Crooked Timber by Henry Farrell that addresses the difficulty of having a debate as opposed to a shouting match on the Israeli-Palestinian question.
Despite the commonality of position ---a two-state solution, a fudging of the Jerusalem issue, and some compensation for the taking of land--a civil argument is virtually impossible. That has been my experience.
What I have found from my postings on the issue is that the major strategy that the pro-Israel groups use is one that equates criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism. Often the charge is that the left equates Israel with Nazi Germany.
It is anti-Israel criticism that offends the pro-Israel groups, not anti-Semitism. This is clear from the way the distinctions routinely made between Jews, Israelis, and Zionists are ignored; the campaign against Hanan Ashrawi to prevent her from giving the 2003 Sydney Peace lecture; the campaign in US campuses to force universities (eg., the Joseph Massad case at Columbia University) to abandon proper academic procedure in evaluating scholarship and to clamp down on critical opinions about Israel in the classroom; and the lack of Israeli criticism of Christian fundamentalist anti-Semites who seek to convert Jews but who support Israel.
Consequently, the pro-Israeli charge is that criticism of a Likud Government is equivalent to a criticism of Israel, because a Likud Israel is the Jewish people.
After Arafat? What then? Will new spaces open up? Should the Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, show political courage and say that he recognizes the Palestinian right to statehood, and that he will negotiate with any successor to Arafat who shows equal recognition of Israel?
In the US it is the Christian fundamentalists who are going to pose a significant but not insurmountable challenge to achieving a fair, just and lasting solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Update:10 November
A paper by Joseph Massad, entitled 'The legacy of Jean-Paul Sartre', can be found here. The legacy is Sartre's failure to see how European Jews who left Europe as holocaust refugees arrived in Palestine as armed colonisers. The article then tackles French intellectuals Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Pierre Bourdieu, Etienne Balibar, and Slavoj Zizek for their failure to acknowledge a change in the status of European Jews.
Massad, wearing the hat of a public intellectual, argues that these intellectuals still represented the Jews as holocaust survivors in Europe. He says:
"The status of the European Jew as a coloniser who has used racist colonial violence for the last century against the Palestinian people is a status they [the Parisian intellectuals] refuse to recognise and continue to resist vehemently. Although some of these intellectuals have clearly recognised Israeli Jewish violence in, and occupation of, the West Bank and Gaza, they continue to hold on to a pristine image of a Jewish State founded by holocaust survivors rather than by armed colonial settlers."
That argument is hardly a reason to be fired from Columbia, or denied tenure. The issue here is not what Massod is arguing--he very well may be wrong.
I for one do not understand what Massad means by an 'anti-Semitic Israel.' But academic freedom means that Massad has the right to make these critical arguments.
From my experience in these debates it is Massad's claim that Israeli is a colonizing power, which uses racist violence against the Palestinians, that offends the pro-Israeli groups. They view Israel as a democracy--the only one in the Middle East.
Academic freedom means that Massad's view that Israel is a racist Jewish state founded on colonial violence can be stated and should be debated and contested. That is what liberalism stands for.
Another paper by Massad. The Campus Watch Report is here.
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You can only have a debate....or even a civilised discussion for that matter....when TWO rational, civilised, intelligent persons engage. When you have one rational, civilised intelligent person and one blinkered pro-Israeli, anti-palestinian screamer, you might as well look elsewhere.