A recent interview
conducted by UC Berkeley’s Public Relations office and timed with the
appointment of the new university Chancellor, Nicholas Dirks, begins,
“Floating around the Internet is a claim that at some point in your
past… you signed a petition for Columbia to divest in all things
Israel.” The interviewer asks the Chancellor-designate to clarify his
role. But let us be clear: this is not a question. It is a demand. We
live in political climate in which robust and critical speech about the policies of the Israeli state is becoming ever more difficult. Its proponents are subjected to myriad forms of harassment in an effort to
shut down such speech. If one wants to be a powerful public figure, the
interviewer is effectively saying to Dirks, distance yourself from that
petition.
Unfortunately, Dirks responds by doing precisely what is demanded of
him. He does not clarify that the Columbia University petition did not
call for divestment from “all things Israel,” but instead from companies
that manufacture or sell arms or other military hardware utilized by
Israel, in violation of US law, against the civilian populations of the
Gaza Strip and the West Bank. He does not say that he did sign the
petition, but, as he might have argued, that once he became an
administrator he recognized he had to play a different role, one that
protects all political speech on campus, regardless of his own personal
convictions, and thus that he chose to withdraw his signature. Instead,
he declares that somehow his name appeared on the petition and that he
asked for it to be removed.
That is not all: Dirks goes much further. He offers a description of
Columbia in 2002 as a time in which broader “controversies” over the
question of Israel and Palestine developed. He narrates those
controversies in the voice of the off-campus Jewish neo-conservative
groups (Campus Watch, the David Project, to name the main provocateurs)
who spearheaded a sustained attack against his own colleagues, who were
faculty members in the Middle East field. The David Project produced a
film, Columbia Unbecoming, that instigated Columbia’s
supposedly “internal” investigation. Parroting their perspective in his
interview, Dirks notes that it was a climate in which “it seemed very
difficult for some [Jewish] students to find safe spaces in which to
talk about Israel where they didn’t feel that the basic context in which
they found themselves wasn’t hugely not just anti-Israel, but by
implication, anti-Jewish and anti-Semitic.” His is a brilliant
rhetorical move, an account of how some Jewish students supposedly “felt.”
In providing no other perspective on the “controversy,” however, Dirks
allows the contention that criticism of Israel’s policies is, “by
implication, anti-Jewish and anti-Semitic” to stand as a simple matter
of fact.
In purveying this false account, Dirks rewrites the history of the
conflict at Columbia. The reality, in contrast, was one in which most
members of the faculty and many students argued that baseless
accusations of anti-Semitism were being wielded in an effort to curtail
academic freedom and free speech. Moreover, Dirks rewrites the
“conclusion” to that so-called controversy. No action was taken against
any professors precisely because 1) the Committee that he himself
appointed, and that he speaks of in the interview, found no evidence
that any members of the faculty had ever done or said anything that
could be reasonably construed as anti-Semitic, and 2) the Columbia
faculty stood overwhelmingly behind the principles of academic freedom
that were threatened by these malicious accusations.
Dirks’ response is disturbing not just for how it distorts the past.
It is perhaps even more alarming for what it portends for the future.
The new Chancellor of UC Berkeley is walking into a situation in which
the California State Assembly has passed a bill that equates defense of
Palestinian rights and criticism of the policies of the state of Israel
with anti-Semitism (Bill HR 35, a nonbinding resolution); he is walking
into an institutional context in which his boss, the president of the
University of California system, was apparently involved in commenting
on and drafting that very same bill (see Center for Constitutional
Rights letter to UC President Yudof, PDF);
he is walking into a political reality in which several Title VI cases
are pending against schools in the UC system, accusing them of fostering
a “hostile” learning environment for Jewish students; and he is taking
charge of a campus in which Arab, Muslim and other students advocating
for Palestinian rights are being targeted by specific Zionist activist
groups for creating a “campus climate” that is “anti-Semitic and hostile
to Jewish students” (see CCR letter to Yudof).
This was a moment for the incoming Chancellor of UC Berkeley to stand
on principle. Criticizing the policies of the state of Israel that
violate Palestinian human and political rights, or advocating in favor
of a boycott and divestment campaign, he might have said, is political
speech, not hate speech. Dirks could have risen to the occasion and said
that even if he is personally opposed to the divestment campaign it is
nevertheless a matter that we must be able to discuss. For that matter,
he could have said that even if he, as the incoming
Chancellor of
Berkeley, disagrees with critics of Israel’s policies, their speech is
nevertheless legitimate, even necessary speech. Dirks should have said
that what is at stake are fundamental democratic principles--not just
academic freedom but free speech itself.
Nadia Abu El-Haj
Lila Abu-Lughod
Gil Anidjar
Rashid Khalidi
Brinkley Messick
James Schamus
The authors are all professors at Columbia University
Thursday 20 December 2012
UC’s new chancellor endorses the falsehood: Criticizing Israel is anti-Semitic
Posted @ 17:08
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