One of my most unpleasant tasks as president of the Graduate Student Senate at UMass was having to interact with university executives. It would be only a slight overgeneralization to call them a bunch of snakes who combine the cleverness of academics with the slipperiness and amorality of corporate executives. They profess high-minded principles like intellectual achievement, academic freedom and humanistic values, while their actual concern is primarily to manage universities to respond to the technological, personnel and even ideological needs of the corporate and military sectors.

In 2007, hundreds of presidents of American universities signed a statement opposing a proposed boycott of Israeli academic institutions for their role in Israeli war crimes. The list of signatories is here:

http://www.ajc.org/atf/cf/%7B42D75369-D582-4380-8395-D25925B85EAF%7D/NYTimes_College_Presidents_Full.pdf

In 2008-09, zero American university presidents condemned the incomparably worse Israeli bombing of the Islamic University of Gaza and the headquarters of its faculty association.

Many of us have been desensitized to this kind of vile double standard, but publicly pointing them out can still be a powerful moral action.

If your university’s president was among those who signed the statement, you might like to hold them accountable by making a public statement. I have written the following open letter, which for various strategic reasons, we have decided not to publish on my campus. Feel free to adapt it and use it on your own university campus. Remember to add a salutation and signature.

In 2007, you signed an open letter condemning an effort by British academics to hold Israeli academic institutions accountable for their collusion with the criminal Israeli occupation of Palestine. The academics opted for a selective boycott, which aimed to target culpable institutions while exempting Israeli academics who oppose Israel’s crimes.

Because of your open letter’s patent silliness – it called on the British academics to boycott American colleges and universities for not engaging in discrimination – and because it trivialized opposition to Israel’s severe war crimes as “political disagreements of the moment,” we assumed, along with the rest of the justice community, that you and the other signatories were motivated not by “fundamental values of the academy” such as “intellectual exchange,” as you claimed, but by the cheap, cynical Zionist partisanship that we have come to expect from the American elite.

We are pleased to present you with an opportunity to prove us wrong, by condemning the recent Israeli bombing of Palestinian academic institutions.

Several weeks ago, the Israeli Air Force bombed several academic buildings of the Islamic University of Gaza in six air strikes, including the science laboratory building and the “Ladies’ Building,” where women attend classes. More recently, Israel bombed the headquarters of the University Teachers’ Association.

Media reports on the Israeli bombing of the Islamic University were in near unanimous agreement that the university was targeted because it is a cultural symbol of Hamas. Astute observers have noted that these bombings are consistent with Israel’s policy of scholasticide – the systematic destruction of Palestinian education institutions, including, in the last several weeks, the destruction of at least four schools run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency.

The Israeli government has made the unsubstantiated claim, disputed by Islamic University officials, that the university was used by Hamas for military purposes. In view of the Israeli government’s history of lying about its wartime actions, its extensive targeting of educational and other civilian institutions, and its refusal to permit independent observers into Gaza to verify its allegations, this claim cannot be taken seriously. The Israeli academic institutions targeted by the British boycott, in contrast, are known to made substantive contributions to Israel’s criminal aggression and occupation.

There can be no doubt that bombing universities and faculty buildings are a more severe form of interference with the “fundamental values of the academy” and with “intellectual exchange” than a nonviolent, targeted boycott, and therefore at least as worthy of condemnation. We invite you to publicly condemn these bombings.

Posted under Uncategorized

My own position on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict has been one of distaste for either side.  I find I am sympathetic to motivations and unsympathetic to rationalizations for violence.  I don’t think the Palestinians or the Israelis have a sound basis for the acts of violence they commit.

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Posted under Politics

It’s difficult to say anything particularly constructive or helpful about the ongoing massacre in Gaza, so this will be limited to simply a few observations that appear abundantly clear.

• The state of Israel has lost its moral standing for its existence.  The original Zionist concept of a collaborative, diverse haven for an oppressed class of people has mutated into an ultra-militaristic state which has violently oppressed the people whose land was taken for that purpose.  No state has an inherent right to exist (did the Soviet Union?  Do countries whose borders have been drawn by occupying forces?), and for many well outside of the Middle East, Israel is losing any legitimacy it may have possessed.
• The perpetrators of this 40 year-long genocide – Israel and the United States – have increasingly backed themselves into a very small corner in the public opinion of the world.  Given the U.S.’ unparalleled economic and military power in the 70s, 80s, and even the 90s, it could afford to overlook the destruction of a small population with little possibility of a threat to its own power.  But economic spheres have and are arising in South America, East Asia, and even Western Europe, and its military force is not as singularly persuasive as it once was.  Empires can crumble, and while the U.S. is currently the only superpower, that can change.  Especially with the whole world against it, minus its client state.

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• We should fear for our lives.  Violence begets violence, and between Afghanistan, Iraq, and Palestine, the U.S. is responsible for more violence now than before the attacks of 9/11.  A future in the United States without some form of violent retaliation is not likely.  However critical one might be of those in the anti-war movement, an implicit aim in every protest and petition is to make the people of this country (and others) safer.  The legacy of our government, on the other hand, is to make us less safe, regardless of the number of times we might have to take off our shoes at the airport or how many Muslims we imprison at Guantanamo.

Why shouldn’t we think that we might be next?  What makes our lives – our children’s lives – less important than that of those children who hear the whirring of planes overhead, followed by the silence of death?  If they can be exterminated, what moral claim to life do we have?

• Apologists for the violence cannot be taken seriously.  At current count, the death toll of Israelis to Palestinians is 5 to 530.  One country is the occupier of the other.  One country has an arsenal greater than any member of NATO (save the U.S.).  One country has a blockade of food and medical supplies of the other.  There is no such thing as parity in this situation.  Any sentence that begins, “Israel has the right to defend itself …” does not merit being finished.  Occupying countries have no rights; they simply have responsibilities.

Apologists include not only those who defend Israeli violence, but those who defend whatever diminutive forces are still launching rocket attacks from Gaza into Israel.  This has nothing to with the right of an occupied people to resist – such rocket attacks are not resistance.  The rocket attacks from Gaza have no logical basis.  Engaging in war, engaging in violence, should at the least have a rational basis in the expectation that it will improve one’s situation.  However, it is abundantly clear (and has been for some time) that not only are such attacks not improving the plight of Gazans, but with a grand total of 5 fatalities, while providing a pretext for Israel to respond, are almost completely ineffective while increasingly contributing to the decimation of the civilian population of Gaza.  One might even suggest that those behind the rocket attacks are in collusion with Israeli military planners, so ineffective are such tactics.

For those of us who live in the countries of Israel and the U.S., both alleged democracies, the responsibilities of our governments are that much more heavy.  We are supposed to have a degree of control over the actions of our leaders.  Our “freedom” and “democracy” are touted as admirable and prominent aspects of our countries.  If we do not use our freedom and democracy to bring an end to the homicidal inclinations of our governments, who can fault the acts of revenge on us by the fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, cousins, aunts and uncles of the innocent who have perished?  After all this bloodshed in a world where violence has become the new universal language, who doubts it is coming?

UPDATE (Thursday, January 8): Apparently Avi Shlaim, who wrote in the Guardian on January 7, also came to the same conclusion regarding Israel’s “right to exist”:

This brief review of Israel’s record over the past four decades makes it difficult to resist the conclusion that it has become a rogue state with “an utterly unscrupulous set of leaders”. A rogue state habitually violates international law, possesses weapons of mass destruction and practises terrorism – the use of violence against civilians for political purposes. Israel fulfils all of these three criteria; the cap fits and it must wear it. Israel’s real aim is not peaceful coexistence with its Palestinian neighbours but military domination. It keeps compounding the mistakes of the past with new and more disastrous ones. Politicians, like everyone else, are of course free to repeat the lies and mistakes of the past. But it is not mandatory to do so.

Posted under Politics

I’m studying for exams and trying to finish a major paper all in the next few weeks. So instead of posting something original I’ll just post this letter I wrote to the editor of my school paper, and add a comment or two.

This past week was Palestine Awareness Week, when members of Students for Justice in Palestine worked to present facts and viewpoints that run counter to the traditional negative portrayals of Palestinians. As part of the effort, the organization created posters presenting facts about the Israel-Palestine conflict that would surprise most Americans, like facts illustrating the enormous disparities in military strength between the Israeli army and the Palestinian people, and between the magnitude of the crimes committed by Israel against the Palestinians and those committed by the Palestinians against Israelis.

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Posted under Culture, History, Politics

Over at the Magnes Zionist, I posed the question (in the comments) of when we might expect to see the first Palestinian Prime Minister of Israel. My guess, rather generous to Israel, I think, is 2037. I view this as generous in light of the fact that Palestinians are politically marginalized as a matter of law and of practice to a degree far greater than that to which black people are politically marginalized in the US.

Those who are subjected to the Zionist propaganda that permeates Western culture, and don’t have or don’t use the requisite intellectual self-defense, could be forgiven for viewing the relationship between Israel and the Palestinians as analogous to the relationship between the US and black people. This analogy follows from the liberal Zionist script: Israel is a democracy, albeit an imperfect democracy that has a race problem, just like the United States; and just like the United States, things are getting better for Palestinians in Israel.

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