Corey Robin's Blog, page 64

From the Lefty Profs Use Lefty Buzzwords to Break Strikes Department

Like thousands of students in Quebec, McGill’s Women’s and Sexual Diversity Studies Student’s Association are striking against austerity. They spoke about the strike to the professors at McGill’s Institute for Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies. Instead of offering their support or simply remaining neutral, the students write in a letter published by The New Inquiry, the faculty condemned the students for

our organizing, our strategies, our tactics, our politics generally, and our commitment to feminist values. We were told that pickets are violent, that we made the WSSA General Assembly a site of intimidation and bullying, and that our mobilization has no impact because it is poorly thought out. We were told, repeatedly, that our strike mandate and our strategy of targeting austerity by striking was divisive and thus anti-feminist.

Lefty professor using lefty buzzwords (“anti-feminist”; I don’t consider “bullying” or even “intimidation” to be part of the left’s particular — or in the case of “divisive,” preferred — vocabulary) to condemn student strikes: it’s an old story, and it ain’t pretty. Though in this case I wonder if the professors realize they’re taking a position considerably to the right of Hayek. He only said that pickets were a form of coercion and intimidation, but he never went so far as to say they were in and of themselves violence.

Speaking of violence, the students also write:

We ask that those faculty members who have indicated they will call security on us if we picket, reconsider their commitment to resistance against state violence, and critically self-reflect on the violence they would be inviting us to be subject to should they do this.

They’ve got a point.

 

Alumni Diplomacy

An interesting coda to the U. Mass. ban on Iranian students in engineering and the natural sciences that was later overturned…

On Friday’s All Things Considered, Melissa Block interviewed US Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz, a former nuclear physicist at MIT, about the nuclear arms negotiations/deal with Iran. This exchange occurred:

BLOCK: There is a really interesting confluence here because when you were starting teaching at MIT, the Iranian, now Iran’s top nuclear physicist, was then a graduate student at MIT. Do you think that had a bearing on the talks, the fact that you shared that history? I know you brought him some MIT swag when you went to Switzerland.

MONIZ: (Laughter) That’s right. Well, because in the – in our second meeting, he had a wonderful event – his first grandchild was born, a granddaughter. And so I was able to get an MIT logoed beaver (laughter) for her crib. So no, I think that really helped in terms of a personal relationship because it really helped us to get into, I think, a very good relationship for discussing these trade-offs.

 

Counterrevolutionary Backsliding, from the Golden Calf to Keynes

One of the elements of the Exodus story I’ve always been interested in is the backsliding; it fits with my interest in counterrevolution, I suppose. The Israelites flee Egypt, bondage, and Pharaoh, but while they wander in the desert, they’re constantly tempted to go back. Literally, to Egypt, and figuratively, to bondage, to false gods, to idol worship. The Bible often speaks of these “murmurings” of the people of Israel.

And the whole congregation of the children of Israel murmured against Moses and against Aaron in the wilderness; and the children of Israel said unto them: “Would that we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the flesh-pots, when we did eat bread to the full; for ye have brought us forth into this wilderness, to kill this whole assembly with hunger.” (Exodus 16:2-3)

The two main reasons for backsliding are material need—hunger and thirst—and spiritual/political fear: when Moses goes up to Sinai, and seems to be gone too long, the Israelites grow frightened. Of what it’s not clear: that without him, they cannot fulfill the covenant, the laws and edicts of God; or that they are simply leaderless; or perhaps more broadly that they are not up to the task of moral freedom and collective agency that has been set to them in the desert. Whatever the reason, that’s when they turn to the Golden Calf (Exodus 32).

One can read the Golden Calf story as not merely a parable of fear or abandonment but also as the opposite of the murmuring from hunger and thirst: in the case of the Golden Calf, the Israelites possess enough riches to fashion a Golden Calf. Theirs, in a way, is an anxiety of abundance, of great material wealth yoked to political and spiritual backsliding.

As I was reading these passages this morning, I thought of Keynes’ “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” which he wrote in 1930. It too speaks of a kind of anxiety of abundance, an abundance born of freedom. Keynes wasn’t speaking of a revolution (and on many readings, neither does Exodus), but he sees this anxiety as arising in the context of an emancipation from material need.

I thought it might be interesting to pair these two readings here: the one from the Golden Calf, the other from Keynes’ Economic Possibilities.

Here’s the Golden Calf story (Exodus 32):

32 And when the people saw that Moses delayed to come down out of the mount, the people gathered themselves together unto Aaron, and said unto him, Up, make us gods, which shall go before us; for as for this Moses, the man that brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we know not what is become of him.

2 And Aaron said unto them, Break off the golden earrings, which are in the ears of your wives, of your sons, and of your daughters, and bring them unto me.

3 And all the people brake off the golden earrings which were in their ears, and brought them unto Aaron.

4 And he received them at their hand, and fashioned it with a graving tool, after he had made it a molten calf: and they said, These be thy gods, O Israel, which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt.

5 And when Aaron saw it, he built an altar before it; and Aaron made proclamation, and said, To morrow is a feast to the Lord.

6 And they rose up early on the morrow, and offered burnt offerings, and brought peace offerings; and the people sat down to eat and to drink, and rose up to play.

7 And the Lord said unto Moses, Go, get thee down; for thy people, which thou broughtest out of the land of Egypt, have corrupted themselves:

8 They have turned aside quickly out of the way which I commanded them: they have made them a molten calf, and have worshipped it, and have sacrificed thereunto, and said, These be thy gods, O Israel, which have brought thee up out of the land of Egypt.

9 And the Lord said unto Moses, I have seen this people, and, behold, it is a stiffnecked people:

10 Now therefore let me alone, that my wrath may wax hot against them, and that I may consume them: and I will make of thee a great nation.

11 And Moses besought the Lord his God, and said, Lord, why doth thy wrath wax hot against thy people, which thou hast brought forth out of the land of Egypt with great power, and with a mighty hand?

12 Wherefore should the Egyptians speak, and say, For mischief did he bring them out, to slay them in the mountains, and to consume them from the face of the earth? Turn from thy fierce wrath, and repent of this evil against thy people.

13 Remember Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, thy servants, to whom thou swarest by thine own self, and saidst unto them, I will multiply your seed as the stars of heaven, and all this land that I have spoken of will I give unto your seed, and they shall inherit it for ever.

14 And the Lord repented of the evil which he thought to do unto his people.

15 And Moses turned, and went down from the mount, and the two tables of the testimony were in his hand: the tables were written on both their sides; on the one side and on the other were they written.

16 And the tables were the work of God, and the writing was the writing of God, graven upon the tables.

17 And when Joshua heard the noise of the people as they shouted, he said unto Moses, There is a noise of war in the camp.

18 And he said, It is not the voice of them that shout for mastery, neither is it the voice of them that cry for being overcome: but the noise of them that sing do I hear.

19 And it came to pass, as soon as he came nigh unto the camp, that he saw the calf, and the dancing: and Moses’ anger waxed hot, and he cast the tables out of his hands, and brake them beneath the mount.

20 And he took the calf which they had made, and burnt it in the fire, and ground it to powder, and strawed it upon the water, and made the children of Israel drink of it.

21 And Moses said unto Aaron, What did this people unto thee, that thou hast brought so great a sin upon them?

22 And Aaron said, Let not the anger of my lord wax hot: thou knowest the people, that they are set on mischief.

23 For they said unto me, Make us gods, which shall go before us: for as for this Moses, the man that brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we wot not what is become of him.

24 And I said unto them, Whosoever hath any gold, let them break it off. So they gave it me: then I cast it into the fire, and there came out this calf.

25 And when Moses saw that the people were naked; (for Aaron had made them naked unto their shame among their enemies:)

26 Then Moses stood in the gate of the camp, and said, Who is on the Lord‘s side? let him come unto me. And all the sons of Levi gathered themselves together unto him.

27 And he said unto them, Thus saith the Lord God of Israel, Put every man his sword by his side, and go in and out from gate to gate throughout the camp, and slay every man his brother, and every man his companion, and every man his neighbour.

28 And the children of Levi did according to the word of Moses: and there fell of the people that day about three thousand men.

29 For Moses had said, Consecrate yourselves today to the Lord, even every man upon his son, and upon his brother; that he may bestow upon you a blessing this day.

30 And it came to pass on the morrow, that Moses said unto the people, Ye have sinned a great sin: and now I will go up unto the Lord; peradventure I shall make an atonement for your sin.

31 And Moses returned unto the Lord, and said, Oh, this people have sinned a great sin, and have made them gods of gold.

32 Yet now, if thou wilt forgive their sin–; and if not, blot me, I pray thee, out of thy book which thou hast written.

33 And the Lord said unto Moses, Whosoever hath sinned against me, him will I blot out of my book.

34 Therefore now go, lead the people unto the place of which I have spoken unto thee: behold, mine Angel shall go before thee: nevertheless in the day when I visit I will visit their sin upon them.

35 And the Lord plagued the people, because they made the calf, which Aaron made.

 

What’s interesting to me in this Golden Calf passage is that in persuading God not to destroy the Israelite, Moses warns God of how it will look to the Egyptians: that God’s triumph over Pharaoh didn’t produce much good for the Israelites in the end. One can read that as a warning to God about what destroying the Israelites will mean for God: his name will not be praised or held in awe by the peoples of the world. Or it can be read as a warning to God about what it will mean for freedom and the oppressed: henceforward, no people will march out of bondage, lest they come to a similar end.

There’s also the switch from Moses the intermediary, trying to save the Israelites from the wrath of God, to Moses the agent of God’s wrath. Really his own wrath, for God has already repented of his plan to destroy them; Moses now seems to be acting in his own right, responding to his own disappointment and rage.

Finally, there’s the figure of the golden calf: obviously meant to be a religious idol, it historically has resonated as the symbol of a different kind of fetish: economic fetishism. For conservatives, the golden calf signifies the slavish desire for economic security at all costs, leading to the embrace of a tyrannical welfare state. For critics of capitalism, it symbolizes capitalism itself.

As I said, I think there’s another way of thinking about the golden calf: as a form of counterrevolutionary backsliding, but in this case, and more specifically, a mode of backsliding that arises after material security has been achieved. The fear of what may happen to us once our material meeds have been met, once the economic problem has been solved, once we have so much gold that we don’t know what to do with it. Except re-enslave ourselves.

That’s a fear that often seems to be most common among the people who already enjoy material security: rich people and a lot of intellectuals. Whether it accurately describes reality is a different question. I’m interested in it as a sensibility, one that recurs throughout our religious, political, and economic texts, a sensibility that seems to explain or compel a backsliding from the forward march.

Hence, Keynes’ Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren (1930):

Now for my conclusion, which you will find, I think, to become more and more startling to the imagination the longer you think about it.

I draw the conclusion that, assuming no important wars and no important increase in population, the economic problem may be solved, or be at least within sight of solution, within a hundred years. This means that the economic problem is not—if we look into the future—the permanent problem of the human race.

Why, you may ask, is this so startling? It is startling because—if, instead of looking into the future, we look into the past—we find that the economic problem, the struggle for subsistence, always has been hitherto the primary, most pressing problem of the human race—not only of the human race, but of the whole of the biological kingdom from the beginnings of life in its most primitive forms.

Thus we have been expressly evolved by nature—with all our impulses and deepest instincts—for the purpose of solving the economic problem. If the economic problem is solved, mankind will be deprived of its traditional purpose.

Will this be a benefit? If one believes at all in the real values of life, the prospect at least opens up the possibility of benefit. Yet I think with dread of the readjustment of the habits and instincts of the ordinary man, bred into him for countless generations, which he may be asked to discard within a few decades.

To use the language of today—must we not expect a general “nervous breakdown”? We already have a little experience of what I mean—a nervous breakdown of the sort which is already common enough in England and the United States amongst the wives of the well-to-do classes, unfortunate women, many of them, who have been deprived by their wealth of their traditional tasks and occupations—who cannot find it sufficiently amusing, when deprived of the spur of economic necessity, to cook and clean and mend, yet are quite unable to find anything more amusing.

To those who sweat for their daily bread leisure is a longed for sweet—until they get it.

…

Thus for the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem—how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well.

The strenuous purposeful money-makers may carry all of us along with them into the lap of economic abundance. But it will be those peoples, who can keep alive, and cultivate into a fuller perfection, the art of life itself and do not sell themselves for the means of life, who will be able to enjoy the abundance when it comes.

Yet there is no country and no people, I think, who can look forward to the age of leisure and of abundance without a dread. For we have been trained too long to strive and not to enjoy. It is a fearful problem for the ordinary person, with no special talents, to occupy himself, especially if he no longer has roots in the soil or in custom or in the beloved conventions of a traditional society. To judge from the behaviour and the achievements of the wealthy classes today in any quarter of the world, the outlook is very depressing! For these are, so to speak, our advance guard—those who are spying out the promised land for the rest of us and pitching their camp there. For they have most of them failed disastrously, so it seems to me—those who have an independent income but no associations or duties or ties-to solve the problem which has been set them.

I feel sure that with a little more experience we shall use the new-found bounty of nature quite differently from the way in which the rich use it today, and will map out for ourselves a plan of life quite otherwise than theirs.

For many ages to come the old Adam will be so strong in us that everybody will need to do some work if he is to be contented. We shall do more things for ourselves than is usual with the rich today, only too glad to have small duties and tasks and routines. But beyond this, we shall endeavour to spread the bread thin on the butter—to make what work there is still to be done to be as widely shared as possible. Three-hour shifts or a fifteen-hour week may put off the problem for a great while. For three hours a day is quite enough to satisfy the old Adam in most of us!

Update (12:15 pm)

William Adler, a political scientist at Northeast Illinois University (he was also once a student in my graduate seminar on American political thought), tells me there’s a midrash that links the gold the Israelites used to construct the Golden Calf to the “jewels of silver, and jewels of gold” that the Israelites “asked of the Egyptians” before they left. Which Exodus tells us the Egyptians gave them; though it also says the Israelites “despoiled the Egyptians,” implying something more like stole (Exodus 12:35-36). Which has prompted, of course, no end of commentary from the rabbis. One of the more intriguing commentaries suggests that the Israelites left Egypt with quite an abundance of wealth. Which might add to the interpretation I mentioned above.

Update (1:30 pm)

Nathan Cedric Tankus responds on Facebook:

From a practical perspective I find the golden calf as a symbol of riches and the “solving” of the economic problem a little hard to swallow. Namely because the “wealth” you’re talking about is gold and jewels while the economic problem—especially if you follow Keynes in the quoted passage—is production sufficient to support the population comfortably. In other words, they’re in a freaking desert! What use are these things to the solving of the economic problem. In fact, I’d argue that unless it is put into the form of the golden calf, these jewels and gold have very little use (or for that matter, exchange) value to them.

More on Biden and the Jews: A Response to Critics of My Salon Column

My Salon column this morning on Joe Biden and the Jews has generated a lot of conversation, at Salon, on Crooked Timber, and on my Facebook page and others. I want to address here four objections to the column that have been made.

1. A few commenters have claimed that I completely misinterpreted Biden’s comment. Biden wasn’t saying, they claim, that American Jews have no guarantee of their safety save Israel but that Israeli Jews have no such guarantee. What’s more, I alone have come up with this far-fetched reading, ignoring for my own reasons—a desire for “clickbait,” one commenter said—the more obvious interpretation of Biden’s remarks.

There’s a few problems with this claim. First, and most obviously, Biden’s remarks were first reported by Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic about two or three weeks ago. Goldberg’s piece, as I point out in my Salon column, has attracted a tremendous amount of attention. The topic of his piece is whether Jews can feel safe today in Europe. That’s the context: the safety of Jews in Europe. But at the end of the piece, Goldberg moves to Biden’s comment, and after reporting it, this is what Goldberg writes:

There was applause, and then photos, and then kosher canapés. I will admit to being confused by Biden’s understanding of the relationship between America and its Jewish citizens. The vice president, it seemed to me, was trafficking in antiquated notions about Jewish anxiety.

Nearly 30 years ago, I moved to Israel, in part because I wanted to participate in the drama of Jewish national self-determination, but also because I believed that life in the Diaspora, including the American Diaspora, wasn’t particularly safe for Jews, or Judaism. Several years in Israel, and some sober thinking about the American Jewish condition, cured me of that particular belief.

I suspect that quite a few American Jews believe, as Biden does, that Jews can find greater safety in Israel than in America—but I imagine that they are mainly of Biden’s generation, or older.

A large majority of American Jews feels affection for Israel, and is concerned for its safety, and understands the role it plays as a home of last resort for endangered brethren around the world. But very few American Jews, in my experience, believe they will ever need to make use of the Israeli lifeboat. The American Jewish community faces enormous challenges, but these mainly have to do with assimilation, and with maintaining cultural identity and religious commitment. To be sure, anti-Semitism exists in the United States—and in my experience, some European Jewish leaders are quite ready to furnish examples to anyone suggesting that European Jews might be better off in America. According to the latest FBI statistics, from 2013, Jews are by far the most-frequent victims of religiously motivated hate crimes in America. But this is still anti-Semitism on the margins. A recent Pew poll found that Jews are also the most warmly regarded religious group in America.

For millennia, Jews have been asking this question: Where, exactly, is it safe? Maimonides, the 12th-century philosopher, wrestled with this question continually, asking himself whether it was better for Jews to live in the lands of Esau—Christendom—or in the lands of Ishmael.

For five paragraphs, Goldberg responds to what he takes to be the centerpiece of Biden’s claim: that the Jews of America cannot count on America to protect them; they must ultimately look to Israel itself.

So the first point to make is that this isn’t my interpretation of Biden’s comment; it’s Goldberg’s interpretation. And Goldberg isn’t just anybody; he’s probably the most influential writer on Israel in the United States, someone who is consistently read by the White House. One would think that if Goldberg got Biden wrong, the White House or Biden’s office would have immediately issued a clarification. They haven’t. Nor have any of those Jewish leaders and officials who were in Biden’s audience when he made the comment he made. And Biden’s comment, or Goldberg’s interpretation of it, has been taken up by others, most notably by Dana Milbank—another not insignificant journalist—writing in the Washington Post. Again, nobody but nobody has taken Biden to be saying anything other than what I have taken him to be saying.

That is, until today, when I pointed out what’s wrong with what Biden is saying.

The other problem with this claim is the statement itself. Here’s Goldberg’s account of the comment:

“I’ll never forget talking to her in her office with her assistant—a guy named Rabin—about the Six-Day War,” he said. “The end of the meeting, we get up and walk out, the doors are open, and … the press is taking photos … She looked straight ahead and said, ‘Senator, don’t look so sad … Don’t worry. We Jews have a secret weapon.’”

He said he asked her what that secret weapon was.

“I thought she was going to tell me something about a nuclear program,” Biden continued. “She looked straight ahead and she said, ‘We have no place else to go.’” He paused, and repeated: “‘We have no place else to go.’”

“Folks,” he continued, “there is no place else to go, and you understand that in your bones. You understand in your bones that no matter how hospitable, no matter how consequential, no matter how engaged, no matter how deeply involved you are in the United States … there’s only one guarantee. There is really only one absolute guarantee, and that’s the state of Israel.”

Even by Biden’s standards, semantically speaking, it makes no sense to open with Meier saying that the only guarantee for Israel’s existence is that Jews in Israel have nowhere else to go, and then to pivot from there to say to American Jews, you know that, despite your influence and involvement here in the US, the only guarantee for the Jews of Israel is that they have nowhere else to go. That doesn’t exactly provide a ringing endorsement of your belief in Israel to American Jews.

Syntactically speaking, it makes no sense either. Even by Biden’s standards. Look at this sentence again:

You understand in your bones that no matter how hospitable, no matter how consequential, no matter how engaged, no matter how deeply involved you are in the United States … there’s only one guarantee. There is really only one absolute guarantee, and that’s the state of Israel.

When Biden says “hospitable,” whom is he speaking of? Whom does he mean the US is being hospitable to? Look at the subsequent phrases, the phrases mentioning consequential, engaged, involved. He is talking to and about American Jews. No matter how consequential, engaged, involved, they are. That’s the subject of address in the first phrase about hospitality. He means, in other words, “no matter how hospitable the US is to American Jews.” What does the hospitality of the US to American Jews have to do with the safety of Israeli Jews? Nothing. And that’s because Biden is talking in this sentence about American Jews, not Israeli Jews.

2. Some people have said to me that Biden is just pandering. I agree with that; he is pandering. Like most politicians. I even say that in my Salon piece: he’s pandering to the Jews. But that’s the point. Notice how John Kennedy, who I quoted in my column, pandered to the Irish: not by saying their country was a refuge for Irish Americans because the Irish didn’t belong in the US, but that the two countries were homes for the Irish because they were both free republics. Biden panders to American Jews not only by disregarding his constitutional oath but by making statements that are anti-Semitic—you Jews can’t ultimately count on the protection of the US government because, unlike the Irish, unlike Latino/as, unlike blacks, you are, well, different, you are not like us, you belong elsewhere. Rather than criticize him, his audience applauds him. Anti-Semitism can sometimes be so deeply normalized and buried in layers of philo-Semitism that we don’t see it for what it is. A much earlier generation of American Jews, I think, would have seen it for what it is, would have been offended by the suggestion that they should look to Israel rather than assume the American state would treat them as the equals of everyone else. Not apparently this generation.

In any event: claiming that Biden is pandering doesn’t change the toxicity of his comment; it only adds to it.

3. A lot of people have criticized this sentence: “A country that once offered itself as a haven to persecuted Jews across the world now tells its Jews that in the event of some terrible outbreak of anti-Semitism they should… what?” These critics have pointed out that the US government hasn’t always or even mostly offered itself as a haven to persecuted Jews. Most notably during the lead-up to the Holocaust.

This is obviously true, as every Jewish child in America knows. I could have written that sentence more carefully; in retrospect, I wish I had.

But one of the reasons I didn’t write it is that it would never have occurred to me that this needed to be spelled out. I assumed, because I was once a Jewish child in America and did learn this at a very early age, that it was a given, so obvious it didn’t need to be stipulated. I would never have thought anyone would think I meant otherwise.

But also, and more important, in a lot of the comments I’ve gotten on this phrase, there seems to be an assumption that not only did the US not offer European Jews a haven in the 30s and 40s, but that it was never a haven to European Jews.

This sentiment bothers me. For two reasons.

First, it’s wrong. Between 1880 and 1920, about two million east European Jews came to the US. A lot of them were fleeing a rising wave of anti-Semitism. One of them was my grandfather, whom I’ve written about before. When he was three, he and his family fled Odessa not long after the worst pogrom in Odessa’s history. They came to the US and found a home here. There was anti-Semitism here, discrimination and sometimes worse. But like so many of that generation of East European Jews they were able to build a thriving community for themselves here. That the US welcomed them because it needed cheap labor has about as much relevance to my point as the fact that the US ended Jim Crow because it couldn’t afford the bad press in the decolonizing world.

But it’s not just in those years when the US provided a haven for European Jews. Beginning in the 1970s, Soviet Jews found a home here as well. I remember a Soviet Jewish family that our synagogue helped sponsor here in the US; my father was especially involved in helping them get started here. According to a report from the American Jewish Committee’s Director for Russian Affairs, in the 1970s, as many Soviet Jews came to the US as went to Israel — much to the chagrin of the Israeli government, which tried to block them from doing so. And the Lautenberg Amendment, passed in 1989, classified Soviet Jews as a persecuted group and gave them automatic refugee status, which prompted another massive wave of emigration to the US from the Soviet Union and then Russia.

So, yeah, to assume that persecuted Jews have never found a refuge in the US is just wrong.

But beyond being wrong, it’s politically dangerous. It plays into an idea of the eternal Jew, forever unwelcome everywhere. It’s fatalistic, and needlessly so. My grandfather was part of a generation of enormously patriotic and proud American Jews. You only need to read a Philip Roth novel to get a sense of that patriotism and pride. These Jews weren’t unaware or unmindful of American anti-Semitism. They just didn’t think that that was the end of the story. They believed they could build America into something else, and to a great degree, they did. As readers of this blog know, I’m not big on patriotism or nationalism, but I am big on pride, particularly pride in one’s own political capacities and collective agency. It just does us all a tremendous disservice to pretend that American Jews didn’t transform this country, that they didn’t make it more welcome, as a culture, to Jews than it once had been.

This, incidentally, is not just a problem for Jews; it’s a problem for our entire political culture, which is swimming in a particularly toxic kind of identity politics. Note that I don’t say all identity politics is like this. Just this fatalistic kind, which is deeply antipolitical, and assumes that there is never a political solution or answer to the problems of racism, otherness, and inter-group conflict and enmity, that there is no political art by which to deal with these challenges other than separation. Separation and ghettos: keeping one group over here, another over there, protecting each group’s presumably homogenous culture and identity from external contaminants and hatreds. That’s the problem with Zionism, or at least one of them, but it’s not a problem peculiar to Zionism; it’s endemic to a lot of politics today.

Which brings me to the last criticism.

4. Many people, including Brad DeLong, have said in response to my column that American Jews historically were threatened in the US and still might be. They take the point of my column to be a criticism of that claim, that I am diminishing anti-Semitism or the potential for it. As it happens, that’s not at all the point of my column. Let’s assume, for the sake of the argument, that the claim is right. My objection is what follows from that claim: namely, the notion that since American Jews are unsafe here, they must look not to the US government but to the Israeli state for their protection. That’s the real problem with Biden’s claim: not that he thinks America’s Jews aren’t safe, but that he’s saying he and the rest of the government can’t ultimately protect them.

As I said to Brad on the Crooked Timber thread, merely substitute African Americans for Jewish Americans in Biden’s comment in order to see what’s wrong with his statement:

You understand in your bones that no matter how hospitable, no matter how consequential, no matter how engaged, no matter how deeply involved you are in the United States … there’s only one guarantee. There is really only one absolute guarantee, and that’s the state of Liberia.

There was a time when benevolent American officials did say stuff like this. And they were criticized bitterly by abolitionist leaders like Frederick Douglass, a lifelong critic of colonization, for saying it.

It expresses merely the desire to get rid of them, and reminds one of the politeness with which a man might try to bow out of his house some troublesome creditor or the witness of some old guilt.

It’s a measure of something “not altogether wholesome,” as I said in my column, that Biden not only said what he said, but that far from eliciting something like Douglass’s response, it was greeted with applause from his audience, and no comment at all, along the lines of what I said in my column, from anyone in the media.

Do the Jews Not Belong in the United States?

My new column at Salon on that crazy comment from Joe Biden that I talked about the other day. Only now I look a little further into it:

A country that once offered itself as a haven to persecuted Jews across the world now tells its Jews that in the event of some terrible outbreak of anti-Semitism they should… what? Plan on boarding the next plane to Tel Aviv? It’s like some crazy fiction from Philip Roth, except that when Roth contemplated an exodus in “Operation Shylock,” it was to imagine the Jews fleeing Israel for Poland.

…

The reason no one has been ruffled by his statement, I suspect, has less to do with any special sensitivity to Jewish experience than with an ancient, not altogether wholesome, notion that the Jews are somehow different. Historically, Jews were thought to be indigestible, never fully a part of the polity, exotic, other, with divided loyalties, not deserving or even worthy of the same respect or treatment accorded to other peoples.

Personally, I don’t have a problem with Jews wanting to be separate and apart, or even with their having divided loyalties (my problem with the State of Israel is of a different order). But it’s that issue of respect and equal treatment that bothers me, of the Jew being marked by the state for special handling, even when—especially when—it’s framed as an expression of compassion and sensitivity. I’m as leery of philosemitism as I am of anti-Semitism. While intended to demonstrate his intuitive knowledge of Jewish anxieties and empathy for Jewish concerns, Biden’s comment betrays, in its Bideneseque way, an almost blasé conviction that, in the end, the Jew doesn’t really belong here, that his real home lies elsewhere.

When it comes to Israel, it’s often said, the normal rules don’t apply. When compared to the experience of Malcolm X or the statements of JFK, Biden’s remarks suggest that that’s true. But it’s not just Israel that’s being treated as an exception here. It’s the Jews. And that’s not something that should be applauded. Least of all by Jews.

Employment Contracts versus the Covenant at Sinai

Here’s an excellent piece about how Amazon requires even its temporary employees to sign non-compete clauses that last a year and a half after their employment ends.

The piece got me thinking a bit about employment contracts versus the covenant at Sinai (it’s Passover time). There are a lot of problems with contracts with employers, which Chris Bertram, Alex Gourevitch, and I explored in our “Let It Bleed” post at Crooked Timber three years ago. Among them are the imbalance of power between the two contracting parties and the fact that no employment contract can spell out all the terms of employment; there are just too many unknowns, both known and unknown, at the workplace.

Interestingly, the covenant at Sinai, the moment when the Jewish people strike their bargain with God, offers a startling counterpoint to these two features of an employment contract.

On the one hand, there is a striking imbalance of power between the Israelites and God; these are by no means equal parties. On the other hand, Michael Walzer and other writers claim, the Jewish tradition is filled with parables and stories about how hard God has to work to win the consent of the Jews, to get them to sign on the dotted line. In other words, they’re not forced into the contract. God first tries unsuccessfully to get other peoples to accept his offer, and only comes to the Jews after he’s failed to win the consent of these others. That makes God more a supplicant. He offers the Jews incentives, giving them water in the desert in order to earn their gratitude. He doesn’t take advantage of his power or their powerlessness; their consent must be genuinely free. (Ezekiel seems to pull back a considerable distance from that freedom. There, God says, “And I will cause you to pass under the rod, and I will bring you into the bond of the covenant: And I will purge out from among you the rebels, and them that transgress against me…and ye shall know that I am the Lord.” In Ezekiel, God is the agent of the Israelites’ consent.)

But more interesting to me is how the terms of the covenant are described at various points in Exodus.

Moses came and summoned the elders of the people and put before them all that the Lord had commanded him. All the people answered as one, saying, “All that the Lord has spoken we will do!” (Exodus 19:7-8)

…

Moses went and repeated to the people all the commands of the Lord and all the rules; and all the people answered with one voice, saying, “All the things that the Lord has commanded we will do!” Moses then wrote down all the commands of the Lord. (Exodus 24:3-4)

…

Then he took the record of the covenant and read it aloud to the people. And they said, “All that the Lord has spoken we will faithfully do!” Moses took the blood and dashed it on the people and said, “This the blood of the covenant that the Lord now makes with you concerning all these commands.” (Exodus 24:7-8)

Notice how often the text insists on that “all.” While God’s power is sovereign, and while the Israelites surrender themselves completely to it, they know in advance all of terms of the power they are surrendering to (God may have considerable additional powers, having nothing to do with them, but that is not what they what they are surrendering to). They know all the laws and expectations that are being commanded of them, and it is all of those laws and expectations that they vow to fulfill. It’s unclear from the text why that’s the case, but one possible interpretation is that the covenant can’t truly be a covenant, a contract, if both parties don’t know completely and entirely what it is that they are agreeing to.

This is not a Hobbesian contract in which one party surrenders to another the entirety of his will in return for a protective power that can be exercised in almost completely unknown and unpredictable ways. And it’s not an employment contract in which a worker agrees to perform a job in return for a wage but necessarily has little sense of what the rules of the workplace are or what the daily ins and outs are of the job she is meant to perform.

Now we know that in real life no contract can spell out every single last detail of its performance and execution; contracts are indeterminate and incomplete. But it seems to be a critical part of the aspiration of the covenant at Sinai, the original contract, that its terms not be indeterminate or incomplete. One might think that a contract with God would be the opposite: that is, an absolute demand merely to submit to the indeterminate will of God. (That, in some ways, is how the covenant is described later, in Joshua 24.) But this one, at Sinai, claims for itself the intelligibility of the most plainspoken manifest of rules.

If God can sign such a contract, why not your boss?

Update (12:05 am)

It occurs to me that perhaps another reason why the Exodus story is so insistent that the covenant spell out all the terms of the Israelites’ obedience to God is precisely because the memory of slavery in Egypt was so fresh. That is, much in the same way that the labor contract was viewed by many as the answering blow to bondage in the American South (though that was always bitterly contested by workers and ex-slaves, as Alex Gourevitch shows), so perhaps was it understood that the covenant at Sinai, even if it entailed obedience to God rather than Pharaoh, had to spell out what the terms of that obedience was. Lest it be too reminiscent of the Jews’ time in Egypt.

Update (12:25 am)

On Facebook, Michael Pollak makes an excellent point:

I think you skip over the implications of the key point you mention first off, which is that no one else will take up God’s offer. That is extreme market power. And employees with that sort of power do routinely sign very favorable and detailed employment contracts.

As I said, that’s just a midrash; Exodus itself says nothing like that. But still, Michael’s is a good point.

Sam Fleischacker’s Followup

Sam Fleischacker, whose guest post last week in response to the Israeli election garnered so much attention and reaction, has a followup piece. Sam has asked me to post that followup here. I disagree with a fair amount of it, but because I posted his original statement here, I feel some obligation to post this clarification and elaboration now. I trust that readers of this blog know my views, and that my posting this statement will not be construed as an endorsement of what it says. 

* * * * *

Here is a follow-up to my post last week after the Israeli election. I’ve been a bit taken aback by the extent of the reaction to it, and uncomfortable about the degree to which I have been taken to move from one political box to another (unqualified Zionist to unqualified non- or anti-Zionist: I never was the first and haven’t become the second). I prefer not to be in boxes, and should probably therefore not use Facebook for political purposes: its format makes it a difficult place to discuss political issues in a nuanced way. This is a longer and less fiery piece but it represents my views more clearly. I was also helped in figuring out those views by things I heard at the J Street conference this past week — a wonderful event, that included a wide variety of voices, including non-Zionist ones (JStreet is a very open organization, which deliberately brings people to its conferences who do not share all its political views). I hope people who read the earlier post will read this piece as well.

The piece is in three sections: one on the significance of the elections, one on the evolution of my view of Zionism, and one on what I think we, here in America, should do now.

On the message of the elections

Many have pointed out that the overall tally of right- and left-wing mandates in the Knesset has not changed much; many have also stressed that the voters for parties like Shas and Kulanu had religious or socio-economic issues primarily in mind, rather than Bibi’s views on peace and Palestinian rights; and some have excused Bibi’s last-minute rhetoric as mere political posturing.

The first two points are perfectly true and the third may have some truth in it; none changes my point about what the elections portend. Let’s start by thinking through what it meant for someone to vote for Shas or Kulanu, let alone Likud, after Bibi’s “No Palestinian state” remark. I set aside the racist tweet on election day. That was the very worst thing he said, but given its timing, it’s hard to estimate what effect it had. The “No Palestinian state” remark is different. It had been leaked by the end of the prior week, came out fully the day before the elections, and fit perfectly with what many people had taken to be Bibi’s implicit view in any case. Its prominence in the news cycle also meant that Bibi was practically calling for a referendum on the end of a two-state solution.

So a person going to the polls on Tuesday would have had to be aware that a vote for any party likely to join the Bibi bloc was a vote against continuing with the peace process, a rejection of two states, and (given Bibi’s other views) a vote for continuing the status quo ad infinitum, even if that meant de facto apartheid — life under military rule, with no political rights and few civil rights — for Arabs in the West Bank.

In these circumstances, one would expect a good number of voters, if they cared about democracy and rights at all, to say to themselves, “Whatever other concerns I have, I must vote against Bibi.” To say instead, “My religious and socio-economic concerns are more important to me than protecting democracy” is to show that, when it really counts, one doesn’t care about democracy. And that’s the best case scenario: many voters clearly and enthusiastically endorsed Bibi’s last-minute declaration, clearly chose Likud over Bennett and Yishai because they thought it was now identical with them.

So the Likud that now sits in government is essentially a Bennett Likud. And the rest of the right bloc are enablers of that sort of view: an exclusivist, undemocratic, illiberal vision of Israel as belonging to Jews alone, who have a right to subjugate 2.5 million Palestinians.

The significance of this point is not that the Israeli public consists of bad or racist people. Jonathan Marks, in responding to me, has urged us not to read the motivations of Israelis in this harsh way, calling for empathy in understanding both sides of the conflict. I think he is absolutely right about that, but my understanding of the elections depends just on the results of voters’ deliberations, not on the motives that went into those deliberations. I don’t pretend to know exactly why so many Israelis wound up expressing an indifference to democracy, and explanations that draw on fear, local concerns, and personal affiliations with and loyalties to certain political units make good sense to me.

What is important is that there is no reason to think that the kind of choice they made, whatever its precise cause, will change much in the foreseeable future. If two thirds of Israel’s voters are willing to vote now for right wing parties that reject negotiations, and reject democracy for Palestinians, what on earth would lead anyone to think that they will vote differently in 4 years, or 8 years, or any time after that? Things are likely to get a lot worse, not better. We may well see efforts to curtail the independence of the Supreme Court, to overturn the Kaadan decision by way of a Basic Law declaring Israel to be a Jewish state. to impose loyalty oaths on Arabs, and to strip Arabs deemed “treacherous” of citizenship. We will certainly see a growth in settlements, an abandonment of the peace process, an increase in fear-mongering and racism and rhetoric that paints all Palestinians as terrorists with maximalist designs, and an increase in the number of leading figures in Israel, and in groups that support Israel, who openly support these moves and modes of rhetoric.

All of these things will help the right grow, not decline — inculcate far-right views in the next group of young Israelis to vote, and push people on the left out of politics or out of the country — and demographic growth, as is well known, also enormously favors the right. So forget all questions about the morality of this past election, and just ask yourself pragmatically: is there really any reasonable hope that future elections will favor left-wing parties? We may not have Netanyahu forever, but what reason is there to think we will get someone better? Moreover, even if a left-wing coalition by some fluke does win election in the next round or two, will it really be robust enough that it can energetically pursue negotiations toward a two-state solution — let alone, if it succeeds, have the strength to remove settlers in the implementation of that solution?

These are the questions that led me to my despairing conclusion about the future of Zionism. For we do not have endless time to reach a two-state solution. A few more years, and the settlements will be so entrenched, the Palestinian leadership so radicalized, and the Israeli and diasporic pro-Israel leadership so firmly right-wing, that there will be no turning back.

Nor can, or should, the Palestinians in the West Bank be expected to live without rights while they wait for a state that may never come. Without realistic hope for a change in Israeli’s part, we need therefore to start thinking about whether talk about two states is a distraction from the real issues and possibilities that lie before us.

There’s been a lot of talk about Bibi “walking back” his no Palestinian state remark, and he has indeed already made efforts to do that. But he can’t walk it back, not in earnest. He won because of it, and he knows that. Everyone around him knows it too: the people who turned out because of the remark put the Likud Bloc in power and will be furious if betrayed. They are also the victors’ ticket to future power. Recall George HW Bush’s campaign pledge, “No new taxes.” Breaking that pledge is widely thought to have cost him the 1992 election, and over the 23 years since that time, practically no Republican in America has been willing to come out for a tax hike. Similarly, no right-wing candidate for office in Israel is likely to commit to a two-state solution, let alone to the uprooting of settlements, for years to come.

There’s also been a fair bit of talk about how we ought all to respect the results of the Israeli elections, whatever they were, because they were an exercise of democracy. This is confused. If the majority of Americans were to vote to disenfranchise Latino or Jewish or Arab Americans, that would be a procedurally democratic vote that would result in an undemocratic country. An example of this sort of thing historically is of course Jim Crow, which was not rendered democratic by the fact that most Americans supported it. The principle of democracy is that everyone subject to a country’s laws should be able to vote on those laws. If the latest Bibi election was a vote for Israel to rule permanently over Palestinians without giving them the vote, then it was a vote to turn Israel into an ethnocracy. That the vote itself was free and fair, among Israeli citizens, makes no difference. The procedure was democratic; the result was an abandonment of democracy.

The one thing that may change the electoral map in Israel is serious external pressure (more on that below, in the section on “On what I think we, here in America, should do now”). Possibly that will come in time to save the two-state solution. If so, I will again support that solution: it is, pragmatically, the most straightforward path to a just peace. It would not solve all the problems with Israeli democracy: much would still need to be done to secure the rights of Israeli Palestinians (and other non-Jews, as well as non-Orthodox Jews). But with a two state solution in hand, that work seems doable. Even a great deal of external pressure on Israel may well not change the policies of the Israeli right, however, or not change them in time. So the goal of that pressure should be democracy in Israel/Palestine — whether or not that comes in a two state form.

On the evolution in my views

As the comments above indicate, my feeling that I can no longer support (political) Zionism is an empirical and pragmatic one, not a conversion to the idea that it is an intrinsically unjust movement. I am a political philosopher, but do not think political commitments should be based primarily on abstract ideals — indeed, much of my work has criticized hat view. Politics is “the art of the possible” and one’s commitments need accordingly to shift when the facts change; the point is try to approximate one’s ideals in practice, in accordance with the historical realities around one. To support the French revolution in 1789 may have been admirable; to support it in 1794 was appalling. To support the full-bore socialism of Britain’s Attlee government in the late 1940s, complete with large-scale nationalization, may have been admirable; it was a nostalgic way of avoiding real political choices by the 1970s. (I confess I retain quite social democratic ideals in theory – but that doesn’t guide most of my “on the ground” political views.)

Which is to say that while I think Israel may no longer be capable of holding democracy and Jewish nationalism together, I don’t think that was historically inevitable or built into the project of Zionism. In principle a state that is both democratic and Jewish seem to me no more impossible than a state that is both democratic and Turkish or Greek or Swedish, or democratic and Muslim or Greek Orthodox or Lutheran. There are many ethno-cultural and/or ethno-religious democracies all over the world; in many cases, the cultural and the religious features are also linked, as in the three I have mentioned.

This is indeed the norm: we live — have lived, for almost two centuries — in a nationalist world. There is tension in practically all nationalist states between their democratic features and their favoritism for one group of their citizens over others, but generally this tension is manageable, without serious detriment to any citizen’s civic or political rights. The tension is greatest where the favored group constitutes but a slim majority of the population, however, and Israel’s constant efforts to maintain a demographic advantage for Jews has long malformed its treatment of non-Jews. But some Israelis have also worked to undo these discriminatory aspects of the state, their efforts were bearing fruit in recent years (in the above-mentioned Kaadan decision, for instance), and I don’t see any structural reasons why Israel couldn’t have reached at least the equilibrium of a Greece or Turkey if it had managed to end its Occupation of Gaza and the West Bank.

None of this is to say, on the other hand, that I have ever regarded nationalist democracies as ideal. In principle, I would prefer to see all states wholly stripped of cultural and religious identity (I argued for that position in a scholarly article a couple of years ago), and cultural and religious peoplehood expressed instead in voluntary communities, or small, sub-state political units: villages or small towns. I think cultural and religious identity is very important — the universalism of liberals and Marxists seems to me misguided. But putting state power behind such identities is dangerous.

I’ve argued for these views throughout my professional career, starting with my dissertation and first book. Accordingly, I have long been more a cultural than a political Zionist (Ahad Ha’am over Ben Gurion): a believer in the importance of a collective home for Jews, which would foster Jewish culture and religion, and take in persecuted Jews from all over the world.  But I also thought that in our nationalist world, where practically every state favors a particular cultural or religious group, small cultural or religious minorities consequently flounder, Jews probably need a state to protect their collective home; certainly, the history of anti-Semitism suggests that.

So political or statist Zionism has long been a compromise position for me, a means to cultural Zionism rather than an end in itself. My guiding thought has been that it would be better if Zionism could be realized on a sub-state level, that there is a particularly difficult balance between democracy and cultural/religious identity in the state of Israel, but that that state was entitled to retain its Jewish identity as long as it remained committed to democracy. That this balance was sustainable has seemed to me gravely in doubt ever since the collapse of the Oslo Accords; I called myself a “tepid Zionist” in 2008, in a series of blog posts on the Israel/Palestine conflict. And now I have come, sadly, to the conclusion that it is not sustainable. This is however not a sharp switch from one view to another, just an evolution that was brought to a sharp crisis by the elections of last week.

At the same time, I think it would be foolish to deny that much opposition to Israel is motivated, not by a desire for a secular democratic state but by the desire to replace the nationalist Jewish state with a nationalist Arab and Muslim state. Hamas openly proclaims this motivation — openly proclaims, as well, its hostility to all Jews, and aspiration to kill them. As for the PA, the 2003 Palestinian Basic Law it passed as a constitutional framework proclaims that Palestine is Islamic and that shari’a is the basis of its law (Article 4). The framework also says that all the laws of Palestine, and the interpretation and execution of its laws, must represent the will of the “Palestinian Arab people” (Articles 1, 97, 107, 116). The PLO charter was laced with similar Arab nationalist language, as have been many of the writings and speeches of Palestinian leaders throughout the past century. Anti-nationalist opponents of Zionism need to recognize, openly and honestly, that the Palestinian nationalist movement is and has always been exactly that: a nationalist movement, every bit as particularist and in every bit as much tension with liberal democracy as Zionism.

A solution to the Israel/Palestine conflict, whether it take the form of two states or of one, must therefore be sensitive to the collective aspirations of both peoples, not pretend that the participants on either side are secular, universalist liberals or Marxists, or turn the Jews into a despised and subjugated minority in a Palestinian national state. There will not be, any time in the near future, a pure liberal democracy in Israel/Palestine; there may be a binational state, but not a non-national one. This means that “one person, one vote” across the land, even if we should pursue that, is an idea vexed with difficulties — working out exactly how to implement it is something that needs careful thought. It may be the only solution we have left, but it is not an easy one.

On what I think we, here in America, should do now

One important task is working out how a one-state solution might be possible. If half the energy that has gone into defining and promoting the two-state solution could now be directed to the problems that will accompany any just and peaceful one-state solution, we might be able to see our way around those problems. Marcia Freedman, in the middle of a stunningly powerful discussion at the J Street conference this past week — a former member of the Israeli Knesset, with a lifetime’s commitment to Israel, who yet is not and has never been a Zionist — suggested that what Israel most needs is strong constitutional protection for all minorities; that would mean, she said, that Israel could remain a homeland for Jews even if they became a minority in the land.

This is a wonderful vision, but arriving at it would require large-scale institutional and attitudinal changes, not just a formal provision in a constitution. These are things that political scientists could fruitfully work on, together with former and present political leaders and activists, from both communities.

On the activist side, it seems clear to me, as it does to many people who continue to consider themselves liberal Zionists — I was very heartened by the anger, the passion and the honesty on display at the J Street conference — that the only chance for change in Israel now comes from outside: that it will take strong, effective sanctions from the US and other countries to move the Israeli public in the direction either of giving up the Occupation or of replacing a Jewish state with a binational democracy.

What “end of conflict” view we uphold is therefore not all that important: two-state supporters, including liberal Zionists, can join together with non- and anti-Zionists in calling for the withdrawal of the US automatic veto, on Israel’s behalf, in the UN Security Council; UN recognition of Palestine as a state; the inclusion of Palestine in UN bodies, including the ICC; and economic sanctions and divestment by the US government as well as private entities.

Other ideas: Peter Beinart has called for a “freedom summer” in the territories, in which Jews join Palestinians in protests and civil disobedience; this strikes me (as it struck many at the J Street conference) as an excellent idea. There are also many ways of supporting the growing, impressive efforts of Palestinian civil society organizations, and of Israeli rights organizations like B’Tselem and Rabbis for Human Rights. Ameinu, a leftwing Zionist organization in the US, helped fund a “get out the vote” effort among Israeli Arabs in this past election; that’s a wonderful model of constructive engagement.

Finally, we can and should all promote the wider exposure of Americans, and especially American Jews, to the conditions under which Palestinians live: Beinart, again, suggested that it should become unthinkable for American Jews to go to Israel without visiting Palestinian communities on the West Bank. This again strikes me as an excellent idea.

Violence in general is counter-productive, and violence against civilians is immoral. For that reason, I am relieved by the turn of so many Palestinians to BDS. It is, as its supporters stress, a non-violent strategy, with a deep history in other non-violent strategies. It has also now begun to move away from academic and cultural boycotts, which I think are a mistake in any context (I’ve attended a conference in Iran — making clear that I was an observant Jew to the organizers — and built a friendship I still treasure with a Muslim professor there as a result), toward economic measures instead.

At the same time, three features of the BDS movement as it currently stands disturb me.

First, it places the right of return among its central and non-negotiable commitments. In some form, a right of return is surely part of any just and peaceful resolution to the conflict (all the Palestinians I heard at J Street this week supported it in principle, although they also all said that it could take a variety of forms in practice), but in its maximalist form, which several organizations that issued the 2005 call for BDS uphold, it is a tool for replacing a Jewish nationalist with a Palestinian nationalist state. That is incompatible with a one-state solution that respects Jewish as well as Palestinian collective rights. In addition, the right of return is irrelevant to the pursuit of democratic rights for Palestinians currently under Israeli rule. I would like to see it set aside, as a goal of BDS, such that joining the BDS movement doesn’t necessarily commit one to it. That would also enlarge the scope of the movement.

Second, the BDS movement, despite its formal opposition to anti-Semitism, has had a less than stellar record in putting that opposition into practice. I do not think there is any justification for pro-Palestinian activity to be mingled with, or to excuse, anti-Semitism. That means calling out and firmly condemning calls like “Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas,” chanted repeatedly this past summer in Europe, calls for a new, Muslim Hitler to arise and kill the Jews, TV specials based on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and claims that Jews drink non-Jewish blood, which have appeared over and over in Muslim countries for several decades – as well, of course, as beatings and murders of Jews, like the shootings in France and Copenhagen a couple of months ago. It also means condemning things like the attempt to keep a Jew off the UCLA student government just because she was Jewish, or to de-register all Jews from a South African university.

Behavior of this kind should never be excused, any more than attacks on Arabs and Muslims should be excused. Pro-Palestinian activists need clearly to recognize that there is a deep and long-standing strain of anti-Semitism in their midst, clearly to reject it, and clearly to work against it. Unfortunately, that has largely not been the case. Students for Justice in Palestine has never, as far as I know, condemned any of the incidents I listed above, let alone rejected Hamas’s ferocious anti-Semitism. The Jewish Voice for Peace issued a perfunctory statement regretting the killings in Paris, not even mentioning the fact that Jews were targeted as Jews in them and devoted mostly to an attack on Islamophobia; the ineptness and insensitivity of this statement was appalling to me.

Non- and anti-Zionists should be more concerned, not less, than other people about anti-Semitism: they after all have to answer the question, “If Israel is not the answer to the problem of anti-Jewish hatred, what is?” It is time for a purge of anti-Semitism from the pro-Palestinian movement. Moral decency demands that, and in addition, only that will allow Jews who care about their people to join Palestinians in calling for sanctions on Israel.

Third, it is time for the demonizing attitudes, and rejection of dialogue, that go under the name of “anti-normalization” to be purged from the pro-Palestinian movement. The issues in this conflict are complicated, and the political movements on both sides are driven by many factors; few Zionists hold their commitments out of racism. Demonizing Zionism just means failing to understand it properly, and dialogue between Palestinians and a wide range of Jews, including full-blown Zionists, is essential if there is ever going to be a coalition that could work out, and work for, a just and peaceful resolution to the conflict.

Of course we should not “normalize” the Occupation — it is and should appear to all of us terribly abnormal, a violation of basic democratic and liberal principles. With that in mind, it is reasonable to refuse to work together with the Israeli government, or Jewish organizations that act as propaganda agents for that government (many Jewish Federations; Hillel International, under the blind and partisan leadership of Eric Fingerhut). But it is wholly unreasonable to refuse to talk to Zionist Jews, to hear their narratives, and to try to understand and empathize with them. Anything else is arrogant and an obstacle to a just peace. “Co-resistance rather than co-existence” is an ugly slogan, with dangerous overtones; it should be replaced by “co-resistance as a means to co-existence.”

A BDS movement that aimed at democratizing Israel rather than replacing it with a Palestinian nationalist state, that actively rejected anti-Semitism in its midst, and that fostered dialogue with Zionist Jews, would be one I could join. I think other Jews strongly committed to their people — even many Zionists — could join that too, especially in the current situation. The power of a movement in which large numbers of Jews worked together with Arabs and Muslims against Israeli injustice would be enormous. It would also be a model for the kind of just solution to the Israel/Palestine conflict — one that actively affirms the individual and collective rights of both Jews and Palestinians — that we should all hope to see.

Why Is So Much of Our Discussion of Higher Ed Driven by Elite Institutions?

One of the things that makes me crazy about the media’s discussion of higher education is how much of it is driven and framed by elite schools. During the 90s, when it seemed like every college and university was fighting over whether Shakespeare should give way to Toni Morrison on the syllabus, it occurred to few pundits to look at what was happening in community colleges or lower-tier public universities, where most students get their education. And where the picture looks quite different.

The same goes today for the wars over trigger warnings and safe spaces: on both sides of the debate, this is primarily an argument over elite schools. Which has little to do with a place like Brooklyn College, where I teach. Seriously: just check out Judith Shulevitz’s recent piece on the topic in the Times, which got so much notice. In a 2100-word oped, here are all the institutions that make an appearance: Brown, Columbia, Northwestern, Oxford, Smith, Hampshire, Barnard, and the University of Chicago. There are fewer students in all of these institutions combined than there are at CUNY alone; between them, these colleges and universities enroll less than .5% of all students in America (not counting Oxford, of course, though it wouldn’t really change the numbers).

This is all a long windup to a piece in this morning’s Washington Post by a Columbia philosophy professor who is teaching at a prison in New York. It’s a lovely article about her experience teaching Aeschylus’ Oresteia to women prisoners, and it makes all the right points about incarceration and education. I really don’t want to take anything away from it. I’ve noticed that an increasing number of professors at institutions like Columbia, Bard, and NYU are teaching in prisons, and I think it’s a wonderful way to share and spread the wealth.

What caught my eye was this passage:

My incarcerated students differ radically from the ones at Columbia. When I walk into a tidy, well-equipped classroom on Morningside campus, I know my undergrads have spent years preparing for academic achievement, supported by family and teachers. Trained to ask hard questions, they consider diverse perspectives and then expect to get to the bottom of things.

When a correctional officer escorts me into a prison room equipped with rickety tables, tangled Venetian blinds, and no chalk, I know my incarcerated students have been locked away for years – sometimes for decades — with virtually no opportunity for intellectual stimulation.

…

My main goal as a teacher in prison has been to create a space comfortable enough for exploration and insight. The circumstance does not make that easy. With a heating system so loud we can barely hear ourselves think…

As any professor at CUNY will tell you, the telltale signs that the author of this piece attributes to prison—rickety tables, tangled blinds, no chalk, loud heating systems—are ubiquitous features on our campuses. I have a very strict no-gifts policy for my students: at the end of the semester, I only accept emails or cards of thanks. But one day a student gave me a gift, and as I protested to her that I don’t accept them, she gently pressed it into my hand and said, “Just open it.” It was a box of chalk: I gratefully accepted it. That’s how bad things can get at CUNY.

Now college is not prison; a seminar room is not a jail cell. I’m not making that argument. I’m making a different claim. Two actually.

First, the way that elite institutions dominate our media discussions really skews how the public, particularly that portion of the public that is not in college right now, sees higher education. There is a war being fought on college campuses, but it’s not about trigger warnings or safe spaces; it’s about whether non-elite students will be able to get any kind of liberal arts education at all—forget Shakespeare v. Morrison; I’m talking essays versus multiple choice tests, philosophy versus accounting—from mostly precarious professors who are themselves struggling to make ends meet.

And that brings me to my second point: at Brooklyn College, we have students who have been to prison or who have friends and relatives who are in prison. The wall between the Columbia philosophy department and prison is impermeable and high; not so the walls surrounding CUNY. There’s a lot of talk these days—thankfully—about prisons and carceral institutions. But when the discussion is framed as Columbia v. prison, we get a false sense of the distance many ordinary Americans, black and white, have to travel in order to get from their everyday lives to jail. It’s often not as far as you think.

My friend and colleague, Paisley Currah, has a paper that he’s presenting today at the CUNY Graduate Center. It’s about how transgendered people are treated in prison, and how that relates to how they, and other people, are treated outside of prison. It’s a complicated and fascinating argument—if you want a copy, email gcpoliticaltheoryworkshop@gmail.com—but the last line hits home:

Prisons aren’t “real life,” but for many, neither is the realm of putative freedom. It’s slow death.

 

Nakba, the Night of Bad Dreams

Last night, I read S. Yizhar’s Khirbet Khizeh. It’s a short novel about the Israelis’ roundup and expulsion of Arab villagers from a single village in 1948. Published in Israel in 1949, it’s a classic piece of modernist prose, veering within a single paragraph from the most biblical cadences and august references to the shit talk of soldiers. It’s also beautiful prose, observing the most incidental details—about animals, vegetation, dress, vomit—that never leave you once you read them.

It also gave me a night of bad dreams. Maybe it’s because I’ve just come out of my six-month immersion in the Arendt/Eichmann archive, but it’s almost impossible—even if you’re the most fastidious of scholars or committed of Zionists—not to read Khirbet Khizeh without some sense of the historical parallels. The co-translator of the novel, Nicholas de Lange, who’s a professor emeritus of Hebrew and Jewish studies at Cambridge University, says, “The Israelis are portrayed really like Nazis.” Lest that make you toss the book aside in disgust or disbelief, let me say that there’s nothing tendentious or unbelievable in the book’s descriptions; it’s quiet, carefully and closely observed prose, yielding what seems like an eminently plausible, and non-accusatory, narration of a war or founding of a state. Anywhere. A slightly more embroidered and lyrical version of Coetzee. But just as horrifying.

Throughout the novel, there are several roundups, where the soldiers and narrator speculate on the Arabs who don’t resist—and the crazy few who do, in a variety of ways (from the dignified and futile supplications of a village elder to the defiant lighting up a cigarette of a mustachioed peasant to a woman, driven insane with grief, racing back to the village she’s just been expelled from and her house that’s just been blown up, with the knowledge “that her home and her world had come to a full stop, and everything had turned dark and was collapsing”). These moments were all too reminiscent to me of the reading about Eichmann I’ve been doing these last six months. It was hard for me, reading the words of a Israeli soldier making fun of those Arabs who simply do as they’re told, who are shocked and surprised by the Israelis’ power into apathy and abjectness, it was hard for me not to think that a mere decade before, Jews were thrust into a similar situation of apathy and abjectness, uncertain what to do except obey, in the hope that something good might come of their cooperation.

In a weirdly contradictory sense, however, the book also refuses such comparisons. Not for political or ideological reasons. But because it hugs so closely the ground of its narration.

The Nakba is one of those grand words—like Shoah or Jim Crow—that by its very nature has to conceal more than it reveals. It’s a necessary shorthand for thousands of local events and decisions, a convenient argot for the multiple and varied experiences of hundreds of thousands of people. It’s one of those words or phrases we all use in order to get to our next sentence or paragraph.

Khirbet Khizeh slows us down. The whole of the novella is one day in one village. The pacing is quick, but the narrative is slow. Every bush, camel, donkey, grass, every twist and turn of an alleyway, is noticed, observed. And every victim and every soldier, it seems, is, too. The sustained attention to this single event, in one day, in one village—how casual and cruel this soldier is, how uncertain this other one is, yet how they all add up to this one awful moment of expulsion and exile, of roundup and transport, those terrible words that should make any Jew shudder—brings the Nakba into focus as no amount of polemic or history quite can.

The first sentence of the book reads, “True, it all happened a long time ago, but it has haunted me ever since.” It’s only been one night of bad dreams for me, but I have a sense of what the author means.

Biden to American Jews: We Can’t Protect You, Only Israel Can

Last September, Joseph Biden said the following to a group that included many leaders of Jewish organizations and Jewish officials in the Obama administration:

I had the great pleasure of knowing every prime minister since Golda Meir, when I was a young man in the Senate, and I’ll never forget talking to her in her office with her assistant—a guy named Rabin—about the Six-Day War. The end of the meeting, we get up and walk out, the doors are open, and … the press is taking photos … She looked straight ahead and said, “Senator, don’t look so sad … Don’t worry. We Jews have a secret weapon.”

I thought she was going to tell me something about a nuclear program. She looked straight ahead and she said, “We have no place else to go. We have no place else to go.”

Folks, there is no place else to go, and you understand that in your bones. You understand in your bones that no matter how hospitable, no matter how consequential, no matter how engaged, no matter how deeply involved you are in the United States … there’s only one guarantee. There is really only one absolute guarantee, and that’s the state of Israel.

In response, reports Jeffrey Goldberg, “There was applause, and then photos, and then kosher canapés.”

This is a stunning statement. The Vice President of the United States, a man sworn to uphold and protect the Constitution, which is committed to securing “the Blessings of Liberty” for all of its citizens and guarantees all of its citizens the equal protection of its laws, tells a group of American citizens that the only real protection they have in this world, the only real guarantee of their rights and safety, is not the US government—their government—but the government of another nation.

Imagine a sitting Vice President telling a group of Mexican-American citizens that no matter how much they have contributed to the American project, no matter how much they participate in local government or Congress, no matter how critical they are to the American economy, they should not look to the American government to protect them from harm but should instead look to the government of Mexico.

When Malcolm X sought to have the United Nations intervene to protect African Americans from persecution—the United States long ago having abandoned any pretense of securing rights for African Americans—it drew the hostility and attention of the State Department, the Justice Department, and the FBI. But here is a sitting Vice President telling Jewish Americans that they should do a version of the same. And instead of criticizing him, which is how an earlier generation of Jewish Americans would have responded, they applaud him.