On December 4, the National Council of the American Studies Association (ASA) unanimously approved a resolution to honor the call from Palestinian civil society to boycott Israeli academic institutions. This decision has engendered intense debate.
The majority of those opposed to the resolution (and to academic boycott in general) have avoided engaging substantive questions, instead deploying hyperbole and hysteria, a distinctive rhetoric of victimhood anybody who has run afoul of Israel’s devotees will easily recognize. Numerous scholars, ostensibly rational and apolitical, have reinvigorated the age-old cacophonies of colonial delirium. The intrinsic affinities of the responsible, objective class of scholar have now been revealed. Those affinities are uglier than even the most weathered among us expected.
A particular response to the resolution has gained traction and warrants rebuttal, the notion that boycott of Israeli universities targets “the Jews” or constitutes a stealth attack against “the Jews.” In this framework, the term “Jews,” accompanied by its exotic article, “the,” sequesters Jewish people from the moral spaces of dissent and renders them exceptional historical actors in geopolitical conflict. Yet the boycott in no way targets Jews. It doesn’t set sights on individuals of any ethnic or religious community. In fact, it doesn’t target individuals at all.
One of the great features of boycott is that it refuses to conflate Jewish cultural and religious practice with the state of Israel. When Jewishness is conflated with the conduct of a nation-state, especially one as belligerent as Israel, cultural practice is at least tacitly implicated in state violence, reducing complex peoplehood to a brute synecdoche of military occupation.
Charges of anti-Semitism from the lobby’s petulant conscripts are unsurprising, but the petulance has also arrived from a more respectable sort. On the ASA Facebook page, for instance, David Greenberg, a Rutgers professor and New Republic writer, proclaims, “For the ASA to claim it opposes anti-Semitism while simultaneously backing efforts to isolate and delegitimize the Jewish state just doesn’t pass the smell test.”
The only unpleasant odor in evidence here is the musty rot of cliché. Greenberg’s type of argument is customary in academe: it relies on the commonplaces of settler colonial logic to forestall substantive challenges to the sites of authority upon which that logic survives. It is a rhetorical flourish that requires neither evidence nor engagement with evidence. In this case, it diverts attention from the matter of Israel’s occupation and what we might do to contest it. Supporters of boycott are forced to explain that we aren’t anti-Semites, instead.
Diverting attention with hyperbole and animosity to avoid substantive discussion is the classic definition of trolling. (If the name is vaguely familiar, David Greenberg is the person who pilloried Howard Zinn for being too simplistic and tendentious.)
A tweet I received from Jonathan Marks of Ursinus College employs the same diversionary tactic: “If you want to keep BDS + anti-Semitism sharply separated Roger ‘Jewish lobby’ Waters ain’t your guy.” The strategy is to root out any hint of anti-Semitism, even if the speaker has to invent it through a show of manifest paranoia. Scholars are tasked with providing substance to points of view derived from available evidence; that these scholars deploy innuendo, assumption, and slander to raise an argument in defense of Israel speaks to the irrational loyalty fostered by the rituals of Zionism.
The idea that the ASA secretly desires the destruction of world Jewry is a byproduct of having no legitimate argument against boycott. Defamation emerges where acumen fails.
Scholars like Marks and Greenberg exploit the notion of objective judgment to impugn the motives of their political opponents. This has long been the custom of those who exalt objectivity; such exaltations implicitly condemn modes of inquiry and theorization that do not accommodate centers of institutional authority. As with claims of anti-Semitism, diversion ensues. We focus on the orthodoxies of cultural normativity rather than considering solutions to the hardship of those impoverished by orthodoxy.
Who is the operative? Who is the dissembler? Who is the manipulator? Who is the troublemaker? Who is being dishonest? Who is debasing the sanctity of scholarship? Who is undermining academic freedom? Those against boycott embody every negative quality of which they accuse their opponents.
Here we are, again, spending our time on them and their self-seeking angst instead of on the victims of the rotten system they support. Their approach is unwittingly brilliant in its half-baked mendacity. We have to work doubly hard to highlight the systemic oppression they support and celebrate.
Enough with the nonsense: boycott of Israeli academic institutions isn’t about “the Jews.” It’s about the racism Zionists visit on Palestinians in the name of the Jewish people, using the imprimatur of cultural autonomy to justify settler colonization. Those who howl about being mean to “the Jews” in response to a carefully-considered boycott of a bellicose nation-state do little more than reproduce the perilous confinement of the ethnic ghetto.
“Here we are, again, spending our time on them and their self-seeking angst instead of on the victims of the rotten system they support. Their approach is unwittingly brilliant in its half-baked mendacity. We have to work doubly hard to highlight the systemic oppression they support and celebrate.
Enough with the nonsense: boycott of Israeli academic institutions isn’t about “the Jews.” It’s about the racism Zionists visit on Palestinians in the name of the Jewish people, using the imprimatur of cultural autonomy to justify settler colonization. Those who howl about being mean to “the Jews” in response to a carefully-considered boycott of a bellicose nation-state do little more than reproduce the perilous confinement of the ethnic ghetto.”
Thanks Steven– on many levels. These last two paragraphs are particularly brilliant.
“Defamation emerges where acumen fails.”
This is a “keeper”! It describes perfectly the treatment that Walt, Mearsheimer, Carter, Waters, Blumenthal, Walker et al have faced……..I’ve never seen it described so elegantly/eloquently.
Larry Summers didn’t get your memo. He recently pronounced that the ASA boycott is “antisemitism, in effect.” He says if that were not so, why is there no similar boycott of all the other countries that mistreat those under their control.
”Supporters of boycott are forced to explain that we aren’t anti-Semites, instead.”
My advice—-quit ‘explaining’, period.
Dont even bother, just ridicule their accusations and laugh at them.
The more you think you are ‘forced’ to explain yoursleves the more they will keep on with their nonsense.
Every time someone opens their mouth to defend against their anti semite slurs the conversation becomes all about the Jews and anti semitism—instead of Israel, international law, Palestine, etc——which is exactly why they use the slurs.
Dont help them by even responding to the charge.
When it comes down to it, the Israel lobby(which was never the same thing as AIPAC; but Walt/Mearsheimer’s original definition was at once much more decentralized as well as accurate) and its apologists only have one recourse and one resource only:
Hijack and divert the discussion by screaming anti-Semitism.
The problem, for them, is that it hasn’t helped. We know that they don’t want to see BDS succeed. Their main challenge is that they have no viable answer whatsoever to the rising challenge of Israeli Apartheid.
For ages, “liberal” Zionists – an oxymoron if there ever was one – used to tell a fable to liberal America something like this:
1. The settlers are not the “Real Israel!”. Every country has their extremists, are you going to stereotype Britain because it has skinhead elements on the fringes of society!? Of course not!
2. And if you are, but fail to do so on other countries = Anti-Semitism!
The problem with this two-pronged approach is that the British government does not have skinheads in Cabinet. Israel has an economics minister(Bennett) who has endorsed an organization which seeks to stop Jewish/Arab interracial relationships.
Lieberman, Elkin as well as the chief justice of the Supreme Court(!) all live in occupied territory. These people are the de facto establishment.
Since Greenberg et al have no answer to this, i.e. their fable of the “Real Israel” falls apart completely under their feet, they have no other recourse but to stall what must happen: sanctions on an fundamentally racist regime. So they invoke anti-Semitism over and over. And essentially nullify Godwin’s law with so many “we know where boycotts of Jews lead to in GERMANY IN THE 1930s!!!!!!!!!!!!1” that your ears start to hurt.
It hasn’t worked so far. Greenberg et al cannot point to the “Real Israel” anymore and fool the world. The real Israel are the settlers and the political parties – including Labor, which initiated them and has sustained them as well as Yesh Atid, whose election campaign begun in Ariel – that support them are in a permanent majority.
The goal should be straight forward. Greenberg support Apartheid by pointing to the Holocaust. Thus, they abuse the memory of the Holocaust while denying the human rights of the Palestinians.
These kinds of people cannot be reasoned with. They only have one single objective: stall and delay the judgement day of Apartheid as much as possible. To entertain debate with these people is to at some level legitimize Apartheid, as if it were negotiable.
“If you want to keep BDS + anti-Semitism sharply separated Roger ‘Jewish lobby’ Waters ain’t your guy.”
The fact that Roger Waters has a Star of David on his floating pig at his concerts, certainly plants the idea that Roger Waters and antisemitism belong in the same sentence. This does not really require invention and it certainly does not require paranoia. True, one can explain that Waters wishes to condemn Israel with his floating pig and the star of David, and obviously Israel employs the star of David as its symbol on its flag and in its rhetoric. Still, the inclusion of a star of David on Waters’ floating pig is not imaginary. And if it is not antisemitic, one can experience it as antisemitic without being inventive or paranoid.
Salaita’s use of the term paranoia to describe such a reaction is wrong and unuseful and the term irrational used by someone who is defending Roger Waters is totally misusing the term. Roger Waters is incapable of irrational discourse and attacking Roger Waters is ultimately rational.