Killing Me Softly, With His Words

Omar Barghouti is a Researcher, a human rights activist and a proponent of the Palestinian Civil Society Campaign for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS). He studies at Tel Aviv University. Okay, so boycotts are not the most successful of activities, especially as you personally want to get ahead.

In the journal Contemporary Arab Affairs, Volume 2, Issue 4 October 2009 , pages 576 - 586, you can read this article:

Organizing for self-determination, ethical de-Zionization and resisting apartheid

And here's the abstract:

This paper argues for a secular, democratic state in historic Palestine as the most morally coherent solution to the century-old colonial conflict because it offers the best hope for reconciling the inalienable right of the indigenous Palestinians to self-determination and the acquired rights of the colonial settlers to live in peace and security, individually and collectively. Accepting colonists as equal citizens and full partners in building and developing a new shared society is the most magnanimous offer any oppressed indigenous population can present to its oppressors, but for such to be attained, settlers must shed colonial privileges and character, accept justice, unmitigated equality, and conscious integration into the region. Building a just and lasting peace anchored in international law and universal human rights, conducive to ethical coexistence requires the ethical decolonization, or de-Zionization of historic Palestine.

Such a process is premised on a revitalized, democratized Palestinian civil resistance movement with a clear vision for a shared, just society and effective worldwide support for reaffirming Palestinian rights and ending Israel's violations of international law and universal rights. By emphasizing the equality of humanity as its most fundamental principle, this paper shows that the proposed secular democratic state promises to transcend national and ethnic dichotomies that now make it nearly impossible to envision reaching any just solution to the most intricate questions.

BNotice, we Jews have no inalienable rights. We are colonists. We have privileges. We must integrate. We need to de-Zionize.

But the real unmitigated gall is in his presumption that his own Arab society can be magnanimous, revitalize itself, democratize its resistance movement with anything approaching something clear, that it is willing to share, that it can sustain a just society and itself has not violated international law and universal rights, that it can support the ideal of equality of humanity or that it could possibly evolve into a secular democratic state which will then transcend national and ethnic dichotomies is sheer chutzpah.

Sorry there for not transcending my ethnic peculiarity in using a Yiddishism but, on second thought, aren't we asking for integration?


P.S. I found this comment on a forum for Israeli academics and thought my readers would appreciate the robust manner of discussion:

What’s wrong, Y?

[Y wrote: A better title for this "academic" conference" in that "academic" center would be: "Joe McCarthy, Where Are You Now When We Need You?"]

Don’t you think that this is a reasonable topic for an academic meeting? Did you actually skim the paper titles? Don’t you think that there’s a decent range of papers presented by people from a range of universities across the world? It’s clearly not what you’d organize. But maybe that’s because you’re too busy editing your “academic” journal (does it feel bad when people place quotes around what you do? Or have you grown to enjoy the warm, self-validating thrill of being under attack while sitting tenured and pretty at TAU?).

Assuming that you agree that the question is a reasonable one – i.e., whether, how, and to what extent, practitioners of terror are inspired by different types of intellectual movements – and you actually did skim the paper titles, then I imagine that your objection to the conference is that is does not include a “Critical” perspective. Or at least it does not appear to. Or am I being too charitable? Perhaps your objection is simply the fact that this event is being held in Ariel. (i.e., no matter how good the quality of papers or discussion, one can’t be academic me’ever la kav ha’yarok. One can only be “academic.”)

Leaving the location of Ariel aside: did you skim the paper titles? If so, then your condescension is all the more alienating. For the hell of it, I just used the same “methodology” to skim the journal that you edit and have concluded that it is nothing more than a forum for self-referential hagiographies of “critical” scholars (Critical?), and for papers whose themes, questions and answers are predictable and paradigm-dependent – one paradigm only, please.

If that’s how you like your academic world, then fine. McCarthyism, truly understood, lives on in you. But I personally prefer my academic world to be a little less predictable, and certainly a little more ideologically disordered. The sad fact is, in this sphere of academic activity in Israel, disorder is better represented by the conference at Ariel than by the types of events that you would laud. And yes, this implies that Ariel is the alternative, the resistance, the subaltern. . . Which means that you are . . . well, I don’t need to tell you, of all people, what the opposite of those terms are).

[Full disclosure: I’m not a participant in the conference, don’t know its organizers, and don’t work on terror or Israel.]

A., Associate Professor, Department of Sociology

On this aspect of internal Israeli academics, Steve Plaut wrote:

So let us sum up the learned discussion on the list regarding syllabi and related matters to date. The predominant opinion seems to be that course syllabi should be filled with “criticism,” but that no one should ever be permitted to criticize academic “critics,” because criticizing academic “critics” is McCarthyism and harms academic freedom. Better yet, why not expand the number of courses at Israeli universities that consist entirely of “criticism,” and in which “criticism” is mandatory and enforced? Meanwhile, people like the Im Tirtzu students the Knesset
education committee members, or the watchdog groups like NGO Monitor and Isracampus should have no right to criticize “critics.” After all, such people are threats to academic freedom and accordingly should be made to wear special stars on their clothing, if not banished outright to critical re-education camps in the Arava with names like Newmangrad.

Now one way of dealing with university courses that contain “criticism,” including Marxist critique, anti-Zionism and Israel bashing, is to label them with warning labels. That way students will know what they are signing up to get. After all, cigarette packets contain warning labels. So why can’t we just have warning labels along the lines such as, “This course contains Marxist indoctrination,” or “This course contains postmodernist content” ??

More generally, it should be clear to all that the term “criticism” is commonly misused in academia to refer to Marxist “analysis” and to the “posts.” The Marxist component includes things like Foucault, Hobsbawn, Shenhav, Peled, and so on. The “posts” include postmodernism, post-structuralism, post-colonialism, deconstruction, and other things that apparently get their “post” names because they are invented by bored clerks in post offices waiting for people to come in to pick up packages.

Curiously, the Social Science list recently carried numerous postings denouncing pornography. But pornography merely demeans the human body. Marxism destroys the human body (the biggest cause of mass starvation in the 20th century was Marxism) as well as the human mind and soul. So just like we would all want a warning label for a university course in which porn is shown to students in massively overflowing lecture halls, should not a course filled with Marxist mandatory criticism also carry a warning label?

And speaking of post-colonialist thought and starvation, should not critical Israeli political science courses contain the critical analysis of the great post-colonialist thinker Robert Mugabe? A few years back he seriously proposed putting the absence of food in Zimbabwe to advantage by developing weight-loss tourism. Fat people from the capitalist world would be invited to tour Zimbabwe and not eat.

There are so many imaginative ways that the money of the Israeli taxpayer can be put to use in manufacturing criticism!