THE ARAB-ISRAELI CONFLICT: HOW TO TEACH ALL SIDES WITHOUT

TAKING SIDES

Donna Robinson Divine

Morningstar Family Professor of Jewish Studies and Professor of Government

Smith College 

Paper Delivered at SPME Columbia Chapter Conference

Academic Integrity and the Middle East

3.6.05

Not surprisingly, the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis provokes deeply felt passions within the halls of the academy, but while the terrible toll exacted by this hundred years' war should command intellectual analysis, it ought not to be enlisted in the service of political advocacy.Politicians posture and champion causes, teachers develop perspectives, generate critical and thoughtful scrutiny, open up conversation, and produce some understanding of the reasons for the persistence of this conflict. Properly practiced, the academic study of this conflict rights no wrongs, provides no political or social therapy and configures no moral compass for what to do outside of the classroom. The classroom is no battleground and the lectern no soapbox. The responsibility of an engaged intellectual is to bring clarity and substance to the issues probed.For that reason, I routinely begin my course on this topic by asking students about the appropriateness of its title: The Arab-Israeli Conflict.I do so to invite criticism, to suggest that my perspective is not sovereign and to say, plainly, that the arguments I may put before them need not be taken for granted.

In designing my syllabus, my task as instructor is to help students develop their analytical and critical abilities as well as to make available to them the body of knowledge necessary for making their own informed judgments long after the final examination has been graded. Over the years, I have experimented with various approaches to achieve these aims""my syllabus never remains the same from year to year, and the changes I introduce invariably generate the need for even further change.

The initial readings, including excerpts from books or articles by Edward Said, Fawaz Turki, Hillel Halkin, Amos Oz, and Aaron Soloveitchik[1], encourage students to confront the fact that this conflict is not only about a piece of real estate: it is also about different and competing conceptions of national identity. And on that topic, Zionists and Palestinians disagree as much within their own communities as across the national divide.

The Said piece enables students to see what might be called the invisible paradigms of the argument in favor of Palestinian national rights. In his book, Said devotes more time to denouncing Zionism than to depicting the nature and characteristics of Palestinian national identity.Zionism is, he claims, no more than an instrument for dispossessing a people and for downgrading a nation into a problem.He heaps scorn on the support for Israel proffered by liberal humanists across the globe.As Hillel Halkin remarks in his reply, while Said is enraged by what he perceives is the neglect and lack of serious attention directed at the humiliations that continue to be visited upon Palestinians, he offers no comparable respect for or recognition of the national right to self-determination asserted by the Jewish people.To speak of Zionism as an appendage of Western imperialism is simply lacking an elementary historic perspective.

Moreover, and perhaps, more significantly, Said's polemic makes clear to my students the historical constraints defining the international consensus on political and moral rights.Twenty-five years ago, when Said's text first appeared, the international consensus evinced sympathy for Israel's struggle for peace and stability.Now the infrastructure of international politics has experienced a whiplash-induced shift in the direction of the Palestinian cause as part of the language and institutional commerce of human rights.This paradigm shift claims to be moral [and by definition, universal] rather than political, but it is organized around power and interests and constitutes a significant achievement for Palestinians who labored long and hard with Arab financial support to assimilate their national claims into the discourse on human rights. These lofty ideals of human rights that bring together people across national, ethnic, class, and gender borders do so in response and in service to particular economic and political forces and interests. This is not to deny that many people all around the world put their lives on the line for ideals.This is to assert, as my students come to recognize, that they do so within a system of values and priorities, reflective of interests-sometimes consciously embraced, often unconsciously accepted-that structure their actions, expectations and choices.

Several years ago I decided I could best reach students by framing the course around the options available at critical moments during the long course of the conflict. Israelis and Palestinians pay a very high price for their nationalist commitments and ambitions, and the reasons for accepting that burden when its implications are so fully clear must be put front and center of any course on the Middle East conflict.But no less important is an examination of the effectiveness of strategies and tactics and of the reasons why Zionists were far more successful than Palestinians in reaching their political goals. Consider the damages resulting from the Palestinian decision to stake their political future on absolute opposition to the establishment of a Jewish state in any part of Israel-compensating, perhaps, for the suffering brought on by the first Intifada-violence still seemed a compelling means of propelling their cause forward.Thus the political benefits conferred by the Oslo Process produced the outrages of another Intifada as Palestinian leaders seemed incapable of subordinating the promises of a redemptive politics with its magical goals of wiping away all injustice to the practical compromises necessary to get a state.

Applying this calculus to Israel, the question for my class becomes whether it, too, has been rightly led to pursue strategies offering the best chance of escaping the untold expense of continued bloodshed or whether failures of imagination have forfeited opportunities for peace and degraded the capacity to recognize the dangers of re-mapping the state's borders even those made in wars not of its own making. So, I ask my students to calculate the costs and benefits of founding settlements in the areas conquered from Jordan in June, 1967, part of the historic land of Israel and its landscape of sacred sites. It may have bestowed both a renewed spirit and religious energy on Zionism-arguably an asset-but did it not also impose on Israel major responsibility for the Palestinian problem, an accounting that may have complicated the nation'sEURTMs foreign relations, raised the costs of its common defense, and produced a prolonged policy paralysis with its own downward political dynamic.

My course on the Arab-Israeli Conflict is one of many intermediate level classes in Smith'sEURTMs Government Department. It fulfills a disciplinary requirement for majors, but it also attracts students pursuing a wide array of studies across the College.Typically, there are as many Arab as Jewish students in my class, although most enroll just to learn something about what appears an endless conflict between sworn enemies that continually dominates the headlines.To equip students with the skills required to understand the ferment of the confrontation, I structure a debate on some topic that is a current focus of controversy last year, the security fence or wall, this year a possible return to the roadmap.I ask students to take on positions normally at odds with their own personal preferences or loyalties.I have had students from Saudi Arabia and other parts of the Arab world "some who wear the hijab"represent Israeli Likud politicians, and there are Jewish students who assume the mantle of Hamas or the al-Aqsa Brigades. Interestingly, my Arab students typically remark that they are happy their fathers are not around to see them perform.Long before this controversy at

On March 6, 2005, I delivered this speech at a historic conference that drew more than 500 people to Columbia University. The conference was co-ed by Scholars for Peace in the Middle East and by The David Project, the group that made the film "Columbia Unbecoming." Hundreds of people had to be turned away. At least twenty newspapers sent reporters. Speakers included Minister Natan Sharansky via satellite from Milan, Martin Kramer via satellite from Washington D.C., Charles Jacobs, the founder of The David Project, and Morton Klein, National President of the Zionist Organization of America, and many others, including speakers from the Sudan and Mauritania who had been enslaved by ethnic Arab Muslims.

Palestine Solidarity Movement members infiltrated the conference; they heckled, hissed, and cursed me while I spoke. Jews Against the Occupation rallied outside on Broadway. The security was very tight and sobering. Although President Lee Bollinger and Provost Alan Brinkley had been invited, neither came, nor did the faculty of MEALAC. Bollinger not only attended the Memorial for Edward Said, he also spoke at it. Provost Brinkley spoke at a conference together with NYU Professor, Tony Judt, a Jew who has called for a one state solution in the pages of The New York Review of Books and elsewhere.

I will soon post a video of selected speeches, beginning with my own, on my website www.phyllis-chesler.com.

Columbia Speech:

The reality is that the Intifada has gone global, and that master propagandists have hijacked both the world media and the western academy.

The reality is that as soon as we speak truth to one lie, a thousand more spring up in its place.

Yasir Arafat is, at long last, dead; both Iraq and Afghanistan have held elections; the Lebanese people have openly protested the Syrian Occupation of Lebanon and its government has resigned-but the Intifada of 2000 is still alive and well on every North American and European campus-so much so that I fear even if Israelis and Palestinians actually make peace on the ground in the Middle East that the academic Propaganda-Intifada, which demonizes both Israel and America and glorifies terrorism, will continue as hotly as before.

My friends: The problem we face goes way beyond Columbia University. The problem is not confined to those academics who specialize in Saudi and Arab-funded Middle Eastern Institutes. The problem is this: The entire "politically correct" Western Academy-including the Feminist Academy-has been fully and fatally Palestinianized.

Professors in every discipline are persuaded that the Palestinians, peace be upon those who have truly suffered at the hands of their own corrupt and vicious leaders, including the Islamikaze bombers, represent the world's ultimate and most noble of victims. These same professors, well trained (or might I say brainwashed) by Columbia's own Edward Said and others such as Noam Chomsky, now view both America and Israel as the "real" terrorists. Orwell would weep. Both President Bush and Prime Minister Sharon have been called "Nazis" and "worse than Nazis"-by professors to whom we turn for the truth.

Today, they deal in lies, not truth, they deal in hate speech, not truth speech. They exaggerate complex and tragic realities-in the service of the most vulgar Jew-hatred, and in the service of death. They do not stand for democracy or freedom or tolerance but stand against it. They condemn and despise the very country that allows them to have their say. Such progressive, liberal, left, feminist, and gay "politically correct" professors have also romanticized totalitarian Islamists.

Indeed, the "good" people, those who really want human suffering and injustice to end, have made an alliance with fascists and terrorists to bring down western civilization-and why? Because it is not perfect, because it has not yet redeemed the entire world. But, until they can accomplish this anti-colonialist, anti-racist "Armageddon," our "best and our brightest" are willing to settle for-God forbid!-the destruction of the Jewish people and the Jewish state. They scapegoat, demonize, and obsessively focus upon the most minor failings of the Jewish state-even as they look away from the ongoing genocide in Sudan and the "gender cleansing" of Sudanese women, the genocides in Rwanda, in Bosnia; even as they consign millions of Muslims and Christians to suffer in medieval misery under barbaric Islamic regimes.

"Politically correct" academics, including feminists, have failed to understand that what we have in America would constitute a revolution in any Islamic country. And that our standards for human rights should be universal.

In 2002, I was among the first to write that today the new-anti-Semitism is anti-Zionism, that the Jewish state has increasingly been treated as the Jew of the world and as the world's most dangerous colonial power. I wrote that today, anti-Semitic propaganda is visually sophisticated, often doctored, hypnotic, and has a vast global reach; and that western academics and intellectuals have made an alliance with Islamist totalitarian terrorists.

I have been wrestling with Jew-hatred on the Left and among feminists and gay liberationists since the late 1960s. By 2000, matters took a decided turn for the worst on every academic and feminist listserv group I belonged to-the propaganda became filthier and the intolerance to any other view more menacing. I was gravely concerned by how many Israeli civilians were being slaughtered, and by how indifferent the media, the United Nations, the Academy all were. All international bodies continued to blame the Israelis for their own deaths.

The New Anti-Semitism was a book I had to write. My people-western intellectuals and academics, progressives-the "good" people-had betrayed both the Jews and the truth. One could no longer reason with them. It was as if they had been brainwashed. I am a psychologist. I do not say this lightly.

My book came out in the summer of 2003. Few feminists, few liberals, and no leftists congratulated me on my truth-telling. On the contrary, many stopped talking to me. The places that have reviewed nearly every one of my eleven other books (often front page and positive reviews) did not review it. I was not interviewed in the usual places. Reporters who wanted to interview me were stopped at higher levels. In the fall of 2003, I interested one such reporter in doing a story about the anti-Israel bias on North American campuses. She too was stopped at higher levels.

In my opinion, American campuses have bred a new and diabolical McCarthyism. Academics now have the right to teach brazen lies, and they expect to be protected in the name of "free speech." Worse, when an academic tries to teach the truth-the truth- about Israel, or about America, or about Jews, they will be ostracized, bullied, demonized, and accused (by the new McCarthyites) of leading a McCarthyite witch-hunt against left wing freedom of expression. This, in my view, is really the censorship of any view that does not conform to a left-wing and anti-American view.

The first amendment and free speech is very important. But, professors especially have a responsibility to teach the difference between a truth and a lie. Too many have abdicated this responsibility. This is a point I tried to make to the President of Duke University, a university that houses my archives and whose welfare I fear I may have endangered by my strong pro-Israel stand. Not a single faculty member at Duke challenged Duke's decision to allow the Palestine Solidarity Movement, which is the equivalent of the Ku Klux Klan or the Nazi Party, a distinguished place to meet, giving it academic credibility.

This is my third speech at Barnard and Columbia on this subject in the last fourteen months. On November 8th, 2003, I spoke at Barnard on what was the eve of kristallnact. What happened was far from pleasant and I have written about it widely. In short: The assembled feminists, mainly women of color, loved my speech, sighed and clapped and laughed and groaned. But they went crazy and became menacing when, in response to a completely out-of-context question about "where I stool on the question of the women of Palestine," which I took to be a question about where I stood on the question of Apartheid, I said that Islam was the largest practioner of gender and religious Apartheid on the face of the earth.The place went crazy. "What about the humiliation at the checkpoints?" "Not as serious as being murdered by your brother or your father because you want to go to college, or choose your own husband."

How did the Feminist Academy become Palestinianized? The answer is both simple and complicated. At their best, they, too, are postmodern and anti-activist activists. They are isolationists, non-interventionists. At their worst, they are Stalinists, and have made an alliance with misogynist terrorists. Better that than to be accused of being racists or colonialists. Better to consign thousands of women to death by stoning and public gang-rape (which I view as gender cleansing). Better to remain silent about the crimes against women under Islam than to accuse their formerly colonized, olive-skinned, or brown-skinned male executioners of crimes against humanity.

Feminists do not question the nationalism of former European colonial powers such as England, France, and Germany nor do they challenge formerly colonized Islamic nation-states with abysmal human rights records-against women especially. Feminists do criticize and challenge American and Israeli nationalism. And they remain divided, contradictory, confused about the use of military power in foreign affairs.

There is a slight thaw underway. Last week, one feminist leader said, all of a sudden, out of the blue: "Everyone knows you're right." But then she immediately changed the subject.

On April 27th, 2004, I spoke at the Columbia School of International and Public Affairs, together with a representative from the AJCommittee, and from the Anti-Defamation League. Rabbi Charles Sheer of Columbia Hillel joined us. Long before the David Project aired their important and influential film, Jewish graduate students had organized the evening in response to the indifference and hostility towards Israel on their campus. All that talent-and only 18 people came, and that included a friend of mine. No faculty, and no non-Jewish graduate students came.

Today, things are obviously quite different. Today, I am not alone as I was at the Barnard speech. Today, there are also a few more than 18 people here.

WHAT MUST BE DONE?

Academics must tell the truth. We must start teaching that Jews and Americans do not cause anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism, and that both Jews and Israel have been the targets of massive hate campaigns against them. Academics must monitor this campaign and get it to stop.

Academics and intellectuals must stand up proudly and loudly, and say that Zionism is not racism or colonialism or Apartheid; that it is the liberation movement of the oppressed and genocidally persecuted Jewish people.

We must fight back, not appease or justify the terrorist who would like to bomb us all back into the Arabian 7^th Century.

Academics must take back the campuses. We must civilize and de-politicize them.

I am especially interested in restoring campus civility and freedom of truth speech in America. 

Twenty first-century western intellectuals must become a force for democracy. We must oppose dictatorships and totalitarian movements that crush liberty and the rights of people.

Phyllis Chesler, Ph.D., is the author of twelve books including her latest, THE NEW ANTI-SEMITISM. THE CURRENT CRISIS AND WHAT WE MUST DO ABOUT IT. which has just arrived in paperback. She is completing a new book which will be published in the fall of '05 about gender Apartheid in the Islamic world and the global struggle for womens' freedom. Palgrave-Macmillan (St. Martinâ's) is the publisher. She may be reached through her website: www.Phyllis-Chesler.com. She is a member of SPME.