An open letter to nine college administrators united in opposition to BDS

On April 23, all of you—the president and eight other senior administrators of Pomona College—circulated an email to Pomona faculty, staff, and students harshly rebuking the unanimous vote of the Associated Students of Pomona College (ASPC) in support of a BDS resolution.  That resolution banned spending ASPC funds on items that “support Israeli occupation of Palestine.”  The list of your names and titles at the end of that email presented an imposing block to the college community; that was precisely the point, wasn’t it?      

Here I offer an exegesis of your imposing signatory block, specifically in light of the arguments your email deployed in attacking the ASPC students and vote—especially your invocation of the fully sound principle that all of us have a responsibility to give due consideration to diverse and opposing points of view, especially before adopting an institutional position.  

To start, let us recall that the ASPC’s pro-BDS vote occurred on Thursday evening, April 22.  Your email response was sent out the next morning at roughly 11 am.  Let me, then, ask this question: is it plausible that in the span of some eighteen hours between the ASPC vote and when your email was sent, that your block’s nine signatories took the time to consider opposing and diverse views regarding the truthfulness, politics, and ethics of your email?  Or does it seem more plausible that in acting to rebuke your ASPC students and their support for Palestinian freedom, your block did not live up to the very standard of inclusive and thorough deliberation that your email itself deployed?

Let’s further consider the plausibility of a robust debate if only internal to your block.  Allow me to imagine the hypothetical exchange in which a college president asks an “interim vice president and chief information officer” (the title of one signatory) to consider adding their name to the email.  Do we imagine that an interim, at-will, direct-report to the president will feel free to respond, “I am sorry, President, but as a matter of conscience, I disagree,” or even, “I’d first like to hear the other side; what do the ASPC students say about the process?” or even the quite sensible, “I am sorry, but I need time to think this over; I simply can’t respond by dawn tomorrow as you have requested”?  Or do we imagine that all the signatories set below the  president understood that they were obliged to sign the email, as a job requirement as it were?  How, in short, was your imposing signatory block assembled?  By an inclusive deliberative process, befitting an institution of higher learning and in accord with your own avowed principles?  or by—let us say it—an exercise of authority?  Was signing consensual? 

The job title, “chief information officer,” raises another question.  That question is this: which of you of the nine signatories—who uniformly joined the block, apparently on the night shift— possess the knowledge needed to assess the claim your email makes regarding “the politics of the Middle East”?  Specifically your claim that the conflict between Israel and Palestinians is, at base, a religious conflict?  

As it happens, I teach a course in our consortium entitled, “Palestine and Israel: the Ongoing Crises and the Plausible Path to a Positive Peace”; and I have published on teaching this politics in the Review of Middle East Studies; and I have also published a number of opinion pieces on this politics.  And I must tell you that my own scholarly judgment is that this claim about “the politics of the Middle East” ultimately being about “religion” is (a) grossly misleading in regard to fact and (b) Orientalist precisely in the sense Edward Said identified and critically analyzed.  I am sure there are some reasonably informed scholar-teachers who would disagree with my judgment here, but my question for you is this: how many of the nine of you have the relevant knowledge to understand your email’s particular claim about the “politics of the Middle East”?  or to understand why a great many scholar-teachers who do possess expertise on this politics would reject your email’s claim as both unfounded and Orientalist?  If that expertise is shared by all or even some of you, then I am glad to know that the study of Middle East politics is now such a standard part of the education of those who become information and financial officers, vice-presidents, and so on—across your entire signatory block.  

What is it, you may ask, that is so wrong and Orientalist about your assertion that the conflict is fundamentally religious in character?  

To start, let us note that in treating this claim as self-evident or axiomatic, your email draws on (and thus draws in) the broader notion that, if it happens in the Middle East, it is always already about “religion.”  We can call this “the Middle East is the site of hyper-religiosity” trope, and we can note that this trope is but a small displacement, or variant, of the idea that Islam (the iconic religion of “the Middle East”) is a distinctly zealous or fanatical religion—that Islam is, in short, excessively religious.  And finally, we can note that this trope is, in its turn, but a small displacement, or variant, of yet one more Orientalist trope, specifically that Muslims/Arabs/Palestinians are fanatical “terrorists” driven by excessive faith, by the very antithesis of reason.  This entire sequence—or better, constellation—of Orientalist tropes is discretely insinuated and nicely sanitized in your email, but at the end of the day, it’s all just so much normalized bigotry.  

There’s more.  Your claim that the ASPC vote was especially reckless because it took a side in a political conflict tied to “religious identities” inserts yet a second unfounded and harmful idea, specifically the idea that opposition to the Israeli state is somehow opposition to a “religious identity,” which is to say, is somehow antisemitic.  It is all predictable.  In our time and place, defenses of the Israeli state always play the dishonest, weaponized antisemitism card.  It’s a compulsory part of the hasbara.

Here we should pause and take note of the asymmetrical rhetorical effects of the claim that the conflict is religious at base: though seemingly even-handed, this claim at once disparages one party to the conflict, while rendering the other (a state no less) the moral equivalent of a protected class.  Orientalist ideologies are insidious indeed.    

It is thus crucial to state plainly that the initiating claim of all of this in your email is nonsense.  The conflict between the Israeli state and Palestinians is not, at base, a religious conflict: it is a conflict between a hyper-militarized state and a stateless people dispossessed of their homeland by that very state.  The notion that the conflict is all about religion is a commonplace, and that is indeed how your email deploys it—as a commonplace.  But it is a commonplace of ignorance—hardly a view befitting persons in leadership roles in higher education.  Understanding that “the conflict” is a case of massive state power being used to oppress a targeted people is an important element of the overall argument for BDS, exactly as the ASPC resolution recognized; mis-naming it a “religious” conflict, as your email does, obscures this reality of state oppression of a people and thereby deters support for the struggle to replace it with freedom: freedom for Palestinians.  

Some further thoughts:

Your letter makes unsupported allegations—false allegations, in fact—that the process that preceded the unanimous ASPC vote was stealthy.  You are right, of course, to oppose stealthy processes; they are wicked.  But allow me to observe that it is in the character of stealthy processes that we generally do not know about them, and that they are refractory to public exposure.  Here let me try to accomplish such exposure in regard to an actual stealthy process that unfolded within our consortium over the last semester—in case you would like to condemn stealthy processes on a principled basis.  

Late in January of this year, the consortium’s Jewish chaplain informed yet another senior administrator here in Claremont (a consortium administrator, in this case) that he, the campus rabbi, was resigning his position.  It was not, however, until April 1 that the faculty and students of the Colleges were informed about this, except on a hand-picked basis. 

Yet, during this two-month information black-out period, much work was done to determine who would be hired as the consortium’s next Jewish chaplain.  In a top-down process fully in violation of shared governance, the consortium’s central administration (i) composed a search committee with hand-picked faculty; (ii) renewed the fusion of the Jewish chaplaincy with Hillel (notwithstanding that Hillel is an Israel advocacy organization with rules that restrict speech and trample academic freedom); (iii) posted a job advertisement for a single position to serve as both Jewish chaplain and Hillel director, thus effectively excluding all but Zionist applicants for the chaplaincy; and (iv) oversaw the selection of three finalists (all Zionists, because the fix was in).  And only then, only after a Zionist hire had been assured, was there an announcement to our community that the campus rabbi had tendered his resignation more than two months previously.        

Now, that was a stealth process.        

Here what must must be added is how gravely the fusing of the Jewish chaplaincy to Hillel betrays specific—which is to say, targeted—students at our Colleges.  Perhaps most obviously, this applies to our many anti-Zionist Jewish students, for whom the fusion of the Jewish chaplaincy with Hillel means that they, or at least their authentic anti-Zionist selves, are unwelcome at institutionally supported Jewish community and worship at the Colleges.  These students are, of course, free to attend Jewish services and even Hillel programs—but they will know that their anti-Zionism (which is to say, their principled anti-racism) is un-wanted and that their views on Israel will never be voiced in Hillel programs.  Compulsory Zionism for young Jews, let us call this.  It should be no surprise, then, that over the past decade, several anti-Zionist Jewish students have been in tears in my office recounting this Hillel barrier to their participation in Jewish community and worship here on our campus.   

Also betrayed are our students who are themselves the victims of Zionism: Palestinian identified students who, very often and quite understandably, see an institutionally sanctioned Hillel chapter (and a campus rabbi who is the Hillel director) as evidence that the Claremont consortium of colleges sides with their oppressors.  The Colleges rightly do not give institutional support for groups that support white supremacism and, on exactly this principle, they should give none to an organization that supports Jewish supremacism.    

So please: fervently condemn stealth processes that occur in our consortium.  But on a principled basis.

Let me return, finally, to your charge that the ASPC students failed to give Zionist students sufficient opportunity to speak against the BDS motion.  As you know, all of the existing and written ASPC procedures were fully followed, with an open announcement of the resolution to all Pomona students, followed by a discussion of the resolution at one week’s open ASPC meeting, and only a week later, at a second and also open ASPC meeting, was a vote taken on the BDS bill.  Consistent with this, the careful reader of your block’s email will note that it identifies no actual violations of procedure: its criticisms are all just sly insinuation.   

I will add that as a consortium faculty member since 1986, I have taught hundreds of Pomona undergraduates in our classrooms, and I can state that, with rare exceptions only, Pomona students—like those at all of our colleges here in Claremont—are skilled in gathering information, analytically sharp, and committed to hearing and weighing opposing views before reaching conclusions.  There is no perfection in this world, and so one can always say the ASPC students might have done more (which is exactly what you said!), but your email’s disparagement of these students is preposterous and a calumny.

In sum, taken seriously—as it should be—your email is nothing other than an abuse of institutional power to bully undergraduates who took a principled stand for social justice.  Disgraceful.  So too, the stealth process that followed the January resignation of the former Jewish chaplain.  Disgraceful.  And in both cases, these were nothing less than acts of fealty to a settler colonial state, an apartheid state, an ethnic cleansing state. [1]  Disgraceful.

All of this is specific to Pomona and the Claremont consortium—and yet none of it is.  It’s the outcome, in one local context, of sticking with a shopworn playbook that so many higher ed administrators, at so many institutions, know to follow, in order to stifle pro-Palestinian activism on their campuses and thereby demonstrate, to those they answer to, how fully they understand the respectable limits on challenging the normalized evils of our world. [2]  Disgraceful indeed. 

In the struggle still,

Daniel Segal

Notes

This open letter draws inspiration from Derek Walcott’s 1981 poem, “The Spoiler’s Return,” especially this line: “I decompose, but I composing still.” Walcott’s poem is set in Trinidad, where I have conducted research, starting in the 1980s.

1. Just four days after your signatory block released its ill-conceived email, Human Rights Watch issued its report, A Threshold Crossed: Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution—which corroborates so much of what Palestinian human rights activists have long known and told the world about the Israeli state.I hope that each of you in the block of nine will take the time to read and study this report before taking any further public positions on the ASPC vote or anything related to this issue.  So too, in the intervening weeks, the Israeli state has unleashed a furious assault against Gaza, following a sustained and continuing effort to destroy the Palestinian community of Sheikh Jarrah in East Jerusalem.  Attention must be paid.

2. In regard to outcomes in other local contexts, see “Blind Spot on Palestine and Palestinians at UCLA: An Open Letter,” Los Angeles Review of Books, June 2, 2021; and California Scholars for Academic Freedom Letter to Middlebury College, May 28, 2021.