Dina — Joseph Massad — Statement in Response to the Intimidation of Columbia University
Topic(s): Academic Freedom? | Comments Off on Dina — Joseph Massad — Statement in Response to the Intimidation of Columbia UniversityStatement in Response to the Intimidation of Columbia University
Joseph Massad
The recent controversy elicited by the propaganda film “Columbia Unbecoming,” a film funded and produced by a Boston-based pro-Israel organization, is the latest salvo in a campaign of intimidation of Jewish and non-Jewish professors who criticize Israel. This witch-hunt aims to stifle pluralism, academic freedom, and the freedom of _expression on university campuses in order to ensure that only one opinion is permitted, that of uncritical support for the State of Israel. Columbia University, the Department of Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures, and I personally, have been the target of this intensified campaign for over three years. Pro-Israel groups are pressuring the university to abandon proper academic procedure in evaluating scholarship, and want to force the university to silence all critical opinions. Such silencing, the university has refused to do so far, despite mounting intimidation tactics by these anti-democratic and anti-academic forces.
The major strategy that these pro-Israel groups use is one that equates
criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism. But the claim that criticism of Israel
is an _expression of anti-Semitism presupposes that Israeli actions are
“Jewish” actions and that all Jews, whether Israelis or non-Israelis (and the
majority of world Jews are not Israelis), are responsible for all Israeli
actions and that they all have the same opinion of Israel. But this is utter
anti-Semitic nonsense. Jews, whether in America, Europe, Israel, Russia, or
Argentina, are, like all other groups, not uniform in their political or
social opinions. There are many Israeli Jews who are critical of Israel just
as there are American Jews who criticize Israeli policy. I have always made a
distinction between Jews, Israelis, and Zionists in my writings and my
lectures. It is those who want to claim that Jews, Israelis, and Zionists are
one group (and that they think exactly alike) who are the anti-Semites. Israel
in fact has no legal, moral, or political basis to represent world Jews (ten
million strong) who never elected it to that position and who refuse to move
to that country. Unlike the pro-Israel groups, I do not think that Israeli
actions are “Jewish” actions or that they reflect the will of the Jewish
people worldwide! All those pro-Israeli propagandists who want to reduce the
Jewish people to the State of Israel are the anti-Semites who want to
eliminate the existing pluralism among Jews. The majority of Israel’s
supporters in the United States are, in fact, not Jews but Christian
fundamentalist anti-Semites who seek to convert Jews. They constitute a
quarter of the American electorate and are the most powerful anti-Semitic
group worldwide. The reason why the pro-Israel groups do not fight them is
because these anti-Semites are pro-Israel. Therefore, it is not anti-Semitism
that offends pro-Israel groups; what offends them is anti-Israel criticism. In
fact, Israel and the US groups supporting it have long received financial and
political support from numerous anti-Semites.
This is not to say that some anti-Zionists may not also be anti-Semitic. Some
are, and I have denounced them in my writings and lectures (see
http://web.mit.edu/cis/www/mitejmes/issues/200105/br_massad.htm). But the test
of their anti-Semitism is not whether they like or hate Israel. The test of
anti-Semitism is anti-Jewish hatred, not anti-Israel criticism. In my
forthcoming book, The Persistence of the Palestinian Question, I link the
Jewish Question to the Palestinian Question and conclude that both questions
persist because anti-Semitism persists. To resolve the Palestinian and the
Jewish Questions, our task is to fight anti-Semitism in any guise, whether in
its pro-Israel or anti-Israel guise, and not to defend the reprehensible
policies of the racist Israeli government.
I am now being targeted because of my public writings and statements through
the charge that I am allegedly intolerant in the classroom, a charge based on
statements made by people who were never my students, except in one case,
which I will address momentarily. Let me first state that I have intimidated
no one. In fact, Tomy Schoenfeld, the Israeli soldier who appears in the film
and is cited by the New York Sun, has never been my student and has never
taken a class with me, as he himself informed The Jewish Week
(http://www.thejewishweek.com/news/newscontent.php3?artid=10049). I have never
met him. As for Noah Liben, who appears in the film according to newspaper
accounts (I have not seen the film), he was indeed a student in my Palestinian
and Israeli Politics and Societies course in the spring of 2001. Noah seems to
have forgotten the incident he cites. During a lecture about Israeli state
racism against Asian and African Jews, Noah defended these practices on the
basis that Asian and African Jews were underdeveloped and lacked Jewish
culture, which the Ashkenazi State operatives were teaching them. When I
explained to him that, as the assigned readings clarified, these were racist
policies, he insisted that these Jews needed to be modernized and the
Ashkenazim were helping them by civilizing them. Many students gasped. He
asked me if I understood his point. I informed him that I did not. Noah seems
not to have done his reading during the week on gender and Zionism. One of the
assigned readings by Israeli scholar and feminist Simona Sharoni spoke of how
in Hebrew the word “zayin” means both penis and weapon in a discussion of
Israeli militarized masculinity. Noah, seemingly not having read the assigned
material, mistook the pronunciation of “zayin” as “Zion,” pronounced in Hebrew
“tziyon.” As for his spurious claim that I said that “Jews in Nazi Germany
were not physically abused or harassed until Kristallnacht in November 1938,”
Noah must not have been listening carefully. During the discussion of Nazi
Germany, we addressed the racist ideology of Nazism, the Nuremberg Laws
enacted in 1934, and the institutionalized racism and violence against all
facets of Jewish life, all of which preceded the extermination of European
Jews. This information was also available to Noah in his readings, had he
chosen to consult them. Moreover, the lie that the film propagates claiming
that I would equate Israel with Nazi Germany is abhorrent. I have never made
such a reprehensible equation.
I remember having a friendly rapport with Noah (as I do with all my students).
He would drop off newspaper articles in my mailbox, come to my office hours,
and greet me on the street often. He never informed me or acted in a way that
showed intimidation. Indeed, he would write me E-mails, even after he stopped
being my student, to argue with me about Israel. I have kept our
correspondence. On March 10, 2002, a year after he took a class with me, Noah
wrote me an E-mail chastising me for having invited an Israeli speaker to
class the year before when he was in attendance. It turned out that Noah’s
memory failed him again, as he mistook the speaker I had invited for another
Israeli scholar. After a long diatribe, Noah excoriated me: “How can you bring
such a phony to speak to your class??” I am not sure if his misplaced reproach
was indicative of an intimidated student or one who felt comfortable enough to
rebuke his professor!
I am dedicated to all my students, many of whom are Jewish. Neither Columbia
University nor I have ever received a complaint from any student claiming
intimidation or any such nonsense. Students at Columbia have many venues of
lodging complaints, whether with the student deans and assistant deans, school
deans and assistant deans, department chairmen, departmental directors of
undergraduate studies, the ombudsman’s office, the provost, the president, and
the professors themselves. No such complaint was ever filed. Many of my Jewish
and non-Jewish students (including my Arab students) differ with me in all
sorts of ways, whether on politics or on philosophy or theory. This is exactly
what teaching and learning are about, how to articulate differences and
understand other perspectives while acquiring knowledge, how to analyze one’s
own perspective and those of others, how to interrogate the basis of an
opinion.
Columbia University is home to the most prestigious Center for Israel and
Jewish Studies in the country. Columbia has six endowed chairs in Jewish
Studies (ranging from religion to Yiddish to Hebrew literature, among others).
In addition, a seventh chair in Israel Studies is now being established after
pro-Israel groups launched a vicious campaign against the only chair in modern
Arab Studies that Columbia established two years ago, demanding “balance”!
Columbia does not have a Center for Arab Studies, let alone a Center for
Palestine studies. The Department of Middle East and Asian Languages and
Cultures encompasses the study of over one billion South Asians, over 300
million Arabs, tens of millions of Turks, of Iranians, of Kurds, of Armenians,
and of six million Israelis, five million of whom are Jewish. To study these
varied populations and cultures, MEALAC has three full time professors who
cover Israel and Hebrew, four full time professors to cover the Arab World,
and two full-time professors who cover South Asia. One need not do complicated
mathematics to see who is overrepresented and who is not, if the question is
indeed a demographic one.
Moreover, the class that this propaganda machine is targeting, my Palestinian
and Israeli Politics and Societies course, is one of a number of courses
offered at Columbia that cover the Palestinian/Israeli conflict. All the
others have an Israel-friendly perspective, including Naomi Weinberger’s
“Conflict Resolution in the Middle East,” Michael Stanislawski’s “History of
the State of Israel, 1948-Present” and a course offered in my own department
by my colleague Dan Miron, “Zionism: A Cultural Perspective.” My course, which
is critical of Zionism and Palestinian nationalism, is in fact an elective
course which no student is forced to take.
Let us briefly review these claims of intimidation. Not only have the students
(all but Noah have not even taken my courses) not used a single university
venue to articulate their alleged grievances, they are now sponsored by a
private political organization with huge funds that produced and funded a film
about them, screened it to the major US media and to the top brass of the
Columbia administration. Last Wednesday, the film was screened in Israel to a
government minister and to participants at a conference on anti-Semitism. The
film has still not been released to the public here and is used as a sort of
secret evidence in a military trial. The film has also been used to trump up a
national campaign with the aid of a New York Congressman to get me fired. All
this power of intimidation is being exercised not by a professor against
students, but by political organizations who use students against a junior
non-tenured faculty member. A senior departmental colleague of mine, Dan
Miron, who votes on my promotion and tenure, has recently expressed open
support for this campaign of intimidation based on hearsay. Indeed with this
campaign against me going into its fourth year, I chose under the duress of
coercion and intimidation not to teach my course this year. It is my academic
freedom that has been circumscribed. But not only mine. The Columbia courses
that remain are all taught from an Israel-friendly angle.
The aim of the David Project propaganda film is to undermine our academic
freedom, our freedom of speech, and Columbia’s tradition of openness and
pluralism. It is in reaction to this witch-hunt that 718 international
scholars and students signed a letter defending me against intimidation and
sent it to President Bollinger, with hundreds more sending separate letters,
while over 1400 people from all walks of life are signing an online petition
supporting me and academic freedom. Academics and students from around the
world recognize that the message of this propaganda film is to suppress
pluralism at Columbia and at all American universities so that one and only
one opinion be allowed on campuses, the opinion of defending Israel
uncritically. I need not remind anyone that this is a slippery slope, for the
same pressures could be applied to faculty who have been critical of U.S.
foreign policy, in Iraq for example, on the grounds that such critiques are
unpatriotic. Surely we all agree that while the University can hardly defend
any one political position on any current question, it must defend the need
for debate and critical consideration of all such questions, whether in public
fora or in the classroom. Anything less would be the beginning of the death of
academic freedom.