By Dr. Andrew Pessin
I weep for the academy.
I weep for the Jews.
As the Islamic Resistance Movement (better known
by its acronym, Hamas) rained thousands of deadly rockets upon Israeli men,
women, and children, the academy loudly and voluminously proclaimed its
endorsement of this effort to murder as many Jews as possible.
Petitions, declarations, statements abounded,
from major universities and academic disciplines and student governments in the
United States, Canada, Europe—essentially the only remaining places on Earth
from which Jews have not yet been nearly entirely ethnically cleansed—signed collectively
by thousands of professors and students and alumni, expressing “solidarity”
with the Palestinians: Harvard, Princeton, Brown, Stanford, Georgetown,
Vanderbilt, CUNY, to name a few.
It is of course wonderful to express
solidarity with suffering peoples. Except when, as is the case here, that
expression can only be understood as endorsement of the murder of as many other
people as possible.
Start with who was firing the rockets.
The Hamas
charter makes its goals crystal clear. The Islamic
Resistance Movement “strives to raise the banner of Allah over every inch of
Palestine,” “In the absence of Islam, strife will be rife … and wars will break
out,” “Israel … will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it,” “Jihad
is its path and death for the sake of Allah is the loftiest of its wishes,” and
“Initiatives, and so-called peaceful solutions and international conferences,
are in contradiction to the principles of the Islamic Resistance Movement.” No
“peace” or “two-state solution” from these folks: they openly seek the
destruction of the lone Jewish state in the world, home to half the world’s
Jews, and will pursue “strife, wars, and jihad” until they obtain it.
And lest you think that goal only indirectly calls
for the deaths of the millions of Jews who live there, the charter disabuses
you of that notion as well with a quote from the Islamic scriptural tradition: “The
Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the
Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees
will say O Moslems… there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him'.” This text
doesn’t limit the Jew-murder to “Zionists,” as it long precedes the modern
State of Israel; nor does it limit the murdering to the Land of Israel.
It endorses Jew-murder wherever there may be
Jews.
Nor is Hamas's desire to murder Jews something
vague and abstract.
On May 7, just prior to Hamas’s launching the
rocket war, Hamas Political Bureau member and former Interior Minister Fathi
Hammad gave some concrete and practical suggestions, in rhetoric similar to
that used constantly, over decades, by Hamas leaders. On Hamas’s state-run TV
station he called
on the “People of Jerusalem, we want you to cut
off the heads of the Jews with knives. With your hand, cut their artery from
here. A knife costs five shekels. Buy a knife, sharpen it, put it there,
and just cut off [their heads]. It costs just five shekels.”
And if the desire to murder as many Jews as
possible weren’t enough, Hamas is also misogynist, anti-LGBTQ+, anti-democracy,
and anti-Christian. Not exactly a shining example of the liberal progressive
ideal that so dominates the Western academy.
You would think that such undisputed
facts might warrant a word or two of critique from Western academics when such
a movement sets out to mass-murder Jews exactly as it constantly says it is
going to do.
Instead the veritable orgy of condemnation was
all the opposite direction.
That orgy offered not a single word against the
attempted mass murder of Jews but plenty of words against the Jews who sought
to defend themselves from the attempt to mass-murder them. The liberal
progressive academy responded with a litany of grievances against liberal
progressive democratic Israel, in order to justify the anti-liberal-progressive
movement’s attempt to mass murder.
The profound intellectual failure here matches
the profound moral failure, and reveals the simmering Jew-hatred that lies
beneath.
Let’s just pick out a few points, to
illustrate. I’ll focus on the Brown
University statement, but similar remarks apply to all of them.
As the rockets rained down on Jewish heads, Brown
faculty, students, and alumni said, “We
condemn Israel's incessant efforts to dispossess and displace 28
Palestinian families in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in Jerusalem, in order
to replace them with Israeli settlers. The recent attempted expulsions are part
of Israel's long-standing project of ethnic cleansing and dispossession.”
One could hardly pack more lies and
misrepresentations into a short paragraph. For the facts see here, but in brief, a private dispute between landlords and
non-rent-paying tenants here becomes a national government effort to dispossess
and replace. For the record, the Muslim population of Jerusalem has
increased 600% in the nearly six decades since
Israel reunified the city. In that same time the Arab population of the West
Bank has
increased some 350%. Whatever is happening there,
“ethnic cleansing” it is not.
“We condemn the continued
bombardment and murder of at least 145 [as of May 17] Palestinian men, women,
and children in Gaza, the displacement
of some 10,000 Palestinians in Gaza as a result of Israel’s offense, and the systematic and
deliberate destruction of Gaza’s infrastructures, already debilitated by a
decades long blockade.”
No mention here of the reason for
the bombardment: Israeli efforts to stop the rockets being fired at them. No
distinction between civilians and militants, nor of the documented fact that
Israel goes to great lengths and expense to target only militants and minimize
civilian casualties. No mention of the hundreds of Hamas rockets that fell
short, in Gaza, that certainly produced some or many of those casualties. No
evidence for the blood-libelous claim of “systematic and deliberate destruction
of infrastructure,” nor of the facts that (1) Hamas rockets damaged the plants
that produce electricity for Gaza and (2) Hamas deliberately targeted the Gaza-Israel
crossings as humanitarian aid was being transferred into Gaza. Nor mention of
the fact that the Israeli blockade restricts only military materials, and that despite
the “debilitating blockade,” Gaza is home to fancy hotels, luxury homes and
cars, and five-star restaurants, and Hamas had no trouble producing an enormous
arsenal of missiles and an enormous network of military tunnels despite the blockade.
“We condemn the Israeli
police’s ruthless attacks on Muslim worshippers in al-Aqsa Mosque compound with
rubber bullets, stun grenades, and tear gas canisters during the holy month of
Ramadan.”
No mention of the fact that during
Ramadan literally hundreds of thousands of Muslims worshipped peacefully at
Al-Aqsa, that only in Israel is there anything resembling religious freedom in
the Middle East, that the true religious discrimination in Israel is found only
in the extensive restrictions forbidding Jews from visiting or
worshipping on their holiest site, the Temple Mount. Nor mention of the fact
that the police “raid” was only in response to violent riots being perpetrated
by the Muslim worshippers, or of the fact that the Mosque was used to store
stones and firebombs.
“We condemn Israel’s medical apartheid regime. Israel has withheld much-needed COVID-19 vaccines from
Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza during a deadly pandemic, while
administering an internationally lauded and extremely effective vaccination
program for the Israeli settlers who reside in illegal settlements throughout
the West Bank.”
A rival to the earlier paragraph in
its lies and misrepresentations, and another blood-libel if ever there was one.
For details see here, but in brief: Israel was under no obligation to vaccinate
non-citizens (yet nevertheless vaccinated hundreds of thousands of them); the
Palestinians never asked for Israeli vaccines or Israeli assistance, and
instead, precisely per the Oslo agreements and in accordance with their large
degree of autonomy, set out to take care of their own citizens. Israel provided
no restrictions on that process and facilitated wherever asked. The only limits
were based on the Palestinian ability to pay for vaccines, but no mention is
made here of the Palestinian Authority’s “pay-to-slay” policy that incentivizes Palestinians to murder Jews, and whose
budget would go far (if not all the way) for enough vaccines for the entire
Palestinian population. Nor is mention made here of the fact that Hamas allegedly
couldn’t afford vaccines but could somehow afford to produce its enormous
arsenal and tunnel network.
You get the idea.
As of this writing, nearly 1000
Brown faculty, students, and alumni had openly affixed their names to this
statement.
There is no effort to be “fair,” or
“balanced,” or to offer competing perspectives, to even entertain the thought
that a conflict that is some hundred-twenty years old, that I prefer to label “the
Israeli-Palestinian-Jewish-Arab-Muslim Conflict” (or IPJAMC) precisely because
it involves all those elements (and many more), might just be a little on the
complicated side. You would think that academics might be sensitive to
complexity, able to handle it, would eschew over-simplification, that where the
truth is complicated the positions one takes must be nuanced.
Nothing like that to be found here.
In fact just the opposite: they
openly, enthusiastically embrace the one-sidedness.
Don’t just take my word for it.
Here is a statement from “Gender
Studies Departments In Solidarity With Palestinian Feminist Collective,” whose language mirrors that of many of the other academic
statements, signed (as of this writing) not by individuals but by some 150 entire
departments, programs, or centers:
We do not subscribe to a “both sides” rhetoric that erases the
military, economic, media, and global power that Israel has over Palestine.
This is not a “conflict” that is too “controversial and complex” to
assess. Israel is using violent force, punitive bureaucracy, and the legal
system to expel Palestinians from their rightful homes and to remove
Palestinian people from their land.
Never mind the grave assault on
reason here when signatories in “Women’s Studies” and “Gender Studies”
departments side with the misogynist, anti-LGBTQ Islamist regime over the
democratic state where women can wear what they want and date who they want,
serve as Prime Minister, and participate in the only Gay Pride parade in the
Middle East.
Never mind the grave assault on
academic freedom committed here when entire departments pledge themselves to a
political position, particularly one where there is indeed “controversy” (their
protestations to the contrary notwithstanding). One can only pity the untenured
professor, or the potential student, or even staff member who might not share
the position the entire department has declared to be the solemn truth.
It’s worse.
As Hamas openly pursues its openly
declared effort to murder as many Jews as possible, these scholars declare that
there is nothing “controversial” here, that there is no “conflict” here, and
there are not “two sides” to the issue.
That is, no two sides on whether
it’s acceptable to attempt to murder as many Jews as possible.
With that attitude it is no
surprise that the website features the Palestinian flag with a logo of a
punching fist with blood dripping from it. (One wonders whether any of their
universities have policies against the endorsement of and incitement to
violence.)
Just to linger on this a moment. Did
we mention that the Muslim population of Jerusalem has increased by 600% since
Israel reunified the city? Or that the Arab citizens of Israel have more freedoms,
and overall greater prosperity, than Arabs in any other Arab country? And this
despite the fact that many Palestinians (including Arab citizens of Israel),
incentivized by their leaders both in the Palestinian Authority or Hamas, have
undertaken a campaign in recent years that has produced literally hundreds of
knife attacks and car-rammings, targeting Jews? Not to mention the 40,000
rockets that Hamas has fired since it illegally took over Gaza in 2007 by
murdering its Palestinian Authority opponents?
Isn’t it possible that there just might
be more to this story—some other side?
Across universities there are many
departments or programs focused on identity studies: Women’s Studies, Race and
Gender Studies, LGBTQ+ studies, Black Studies, Palestinian Studies as well,
etc. Consistently these programs also openly advocate for the groups they study
(a separate problem for the academy, for another day). There are also numerous
Jewish Studies and Israel Studies departments. Oddly these programs not only
rarely openly advocate for Jews or Israel, but are populated by individuals who
openly advocate against their subjects.
So it’s also no surprise that some
200 “scholars
of Jewish Studies and of Israel studies” jumped on the bandwagon of condemnation of Israel, once Hamas
began its most recent campaign of mass Jewish murder.
They declare: “We condemn the state
violence that the Israeli government and its security forces have been carrying
out in Gaza.” So, Jews with rockets raining upon them are condemned for trying
to stop the rocket fire.
“[We condemn] their evictions of
Palestinian residents of Sheikh Jarrah and other neighborhoods of East
Jerusalem.” So, Israel is not allowed to apply its ethnicity-neutral laws in the
territory it controls in order to protect landlords from tenants who refuse to
pay rent. Or more accurately: Israel must develop ethnic-based laws that
prevent only Jewish landlords from having any rights where the tenants are
Arabs. Or more accurately still: Arabs must not be required to pay rent to
Jews.
“[We condemn] their suppression of
civilian protests in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Jewish-Arab cities, and
Palestinian towns and villages in Israel.” So, Arabs must be allowed to riot without
restriction and with impunity. Never mind the dozens of synagogues vandalized,
the murders and attempted murders, the smashing and burning of cars, etc.
In short: Israel is not permitted
to defend itself from mass murder attempts, to enforce its ethnicity-neutral
laws, or to maintain public order. Jews,
in other words, are not merely not permitted any form of sovereignty here, but
are not permitted even to live here.
“We share and hold the pain of
Gazans, who have lost and are losing family members, homes, property,
businesses, cultural institutions, medical facilities, and civilian
infrastructure to Israeli bombings.” There was apparently no space in this long
declaration to share and hold the pain of Israelis, who even after having to
spend billions of dollars for the Iron Dome and bomb shelters and rocket alert
systems as well as extensive systems to minimize civilian casualties on the
other side, themselves are murdered and injured and their property destroyed by
thousands of rockets, and are individually targeted by knife attacks, car
rammings, and lynchings.
But there is space enough for them to
mention that Zionism—the Jewish movement for self-determination in the
ancestral Jewish homeland, that also saved millions of Jewish lives by succeeding—amounts,
in their view, “to unjust, enduring, and unsustainable systems of Jewish
supremacy, ethnonational segregation, discrimination, and violence against
Palestinians.”
But not space enough to mention
that Israel is one of the most “ethno-nationally” diverse populations on this
planet, that it pursues (if not always successfully) equality under the law,
that it has been subject to relentless “state violence” from neighboring states
and terrorist groups and individual violence from individual Palestinians
against individual Jews.
And “Jewish supremacy”?
Goebbels would be proud.
This from “scholars of Jewish and
Israel Studies,” as the rockets rain down on Jewish heads. (Potential donors to
Jewish and Israel Studies Departments: please take note.)
Oddly they were so busy supporting
Hamas in this conflict that they completely forgot to condemn Hamas, which
openly calls to murder all Jews in the name of establishing Islam “over every
inch of Palestine,” for its Islamist supremacy.
Whoops.
Perhaps one can take some comfort
from the fact that, buried in their voluminous screed, is this single line: “We
affirm the pain, fear, and anger of Israeli Jews and Palestinian citizens of
Israel who have lost loved ones and homes to unjustifiable and indiscriminate
Hamas rockets.” One can hear them telling themselves, “Look, we are being ‘balanced’
because we mention Hamas’s ‘unjustifiable and indiscriminate’ rockets.”
Of course they don’t actually condemn
the rockets the way they condemn everything about Israel, they just “affirm”
the pain, fear, and anger, whatever that means. And whatever comfort one might have
taken from that nearly invisible acknowledgment that the rockets are
“unjustifiable and indiscriminate” must surely be countered by the fact that
the long bulk of the declaration in fact serves to justify those very rockets.
One would perhaps take about the same comfort as would a woman who has
tragically just been raped being told, “That action was unjustifiable, of
course, but, you know, look how you dress.”
And indeed one should be equally
offended.
The dominant ideal in Western
universities is that of progressivism, including care and concern for the
marginalized and the oppressed. These institutions also pride themselves as
being in the business of the pursuit of truth. And yet when the ethnically
diverse democratic nation that aspires to those same ideals—that does more to
protect and elevate women, LGBTQ+, and religious minorities than any other
country in the region, and whose Arab minority serves in all professions,
government, and the Supreme Court—is attacked by a religious extremist group
that took control of Gaza via an illegal murderous coup and has since ruled it
with an iron fist, suppresses all dissent, oppresses women and Christians,
persecutes and executes gays, and also openly declares and openly pursues the
goal of murdering as many Jews as possible, what happens?
These institutions abandon any
interest in truth, any interest in their own professed ideals, and see only the
“one side,” the anti-progressive side, the one that wants to murder Jews.
This isn’t about any particular
Israeli policy or behavior.
This is about removing Jews from
the Land of Israel entirely—and everywhere else.
It may indeed be time for Jews to
remove themselves from these institutions, where they clearly aren’t welcome.
I weep for the academy.
And I weep for the Jews.
---
Dr. Andrew Pessin is a professor at Connecticut College. He has written a number of books including The Jewish God Question: What Jewish Thinkers Have Said About God, The Book, The People, and the Land, The 60-Second Philosopher and Anti-Zionism on Campus: The University, Free Speech, and BDS.
Follow him on twitter @AndrewPessin
For more information about him and his work, visit www.andrewpessin.com
