This Article originally appeared in Israel Horizons (Summer 2005) a publication of Meretz USA
One hundred students, faculty, journalists and other interested parties gathered at Columbia University, on the night of Feb. 3, to discuss the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The “call to dialogue” event came at a time when the university has been roiled in controversy over how the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has impacted upon academic freedom. The volatile atmosphere at Columbia came to the fore with the sudden cancellation of a conference on the prospects of negotiation between Israelis and Palestinians, organized by the Center for International Conflict Resolution (CICR). There were different reports in the media as to the reasons for the cancellation, but the one most troubling to Jewish students was Israeli Ambassador Daniel Ayalon’s announcement that he was boycotting the conference, due to what he understood to be anti-Israel sentiments at Columbia.
The Union of Progressive Zionists (UPZ) is a students’ organization formed a year ago on the initiative of, and in close partnership with, Hashomer Hatzair, Habonim Dror, MERETZ USA and Ameinu. The UPZ developed the program featuring Meretz/Yahad-Social Democratic Israel Party MK Avshalom Vilan and Palestinian-American legal advisor for the Palestinian Authority, Amjad Atallah, in response to the cancellation of the earlier scheduled CICR event. This program was co-sponsored by CICR, Just Peace, Columbians for Academic Freedom, Qanun, and the Columbia Muslim Students Association.
The UPZ’s intention was to ensure that the gates of discussion remained open at Columbia. The high turnout on short notice demonstrated that students are indeed committed to being informed on the issues and talking them out with each other, regardless of the tendentious climate that has arisen. With the UPZ’s support, the students managed to successfully send the message that they will not tolerate extremist voices to polarize and stifle the debate on their campus.
Our Discussion On Columbia
Israel Horizons has invited input from representatives of the Zionist groups residing at Beit Shalom, the suite of offices shared by MERETZ USA and a number of kindred Zionist and Jewish activist organizations at 114 West 26th Street in Manhattan. Responding below are Ari Brochin, director of the Union of Progressive Zionists, and Aaron Wolfe, director of Hashomer Hatzair in North America. This Article originally appeared in Israel Horizons (Summer 2005) a publication of Meretz USA
IH: My question relates to the facts. If you are familiar with Nat Hentoff’s free speech and human rights column in The Village Voice, you would know that he sympathizes with Jewish students and faculty at Columbia as depicted in the David Project film, “Columbia Unbecoming”, alleging the intimidation of students (and some faculty) with pro-Israel views. Hentoff also quotes Dr. Massad and one other member of the Middle East and Asian Languages and Culture (MEALAC) department faculty in a way that supports this charge. Moreover, Hentoff criticizes the Columbia administration for “whitewashing” this issue in its recent report.
But, in the spirit of fair play that is Hentoff’s hallmark, he condemns New York City schools chancellor Klein for firing Prof. Rashid Khalidi from an advisory position. Hentoff indicates that although Khalidi is a prominent pro-Palestinian activist outside the classroom, he is committed to scholarship and free inquiry inside his classroom. So how do you see the facts?
ARI BROCHIN: There are a number of overlapping issues in this controversy, and few of the participants or commentators have been very successful at proposing a solution that addresses all of them. Issues that have been raised by this controversy include but may not be limited to:
1. Intimidation of students by faculty:
This should be the easiest issue to deal with. Everyone involved, at least rhetorically, believes that students should not have to fear for their grades, their dignity, or their physical safety because of opinions they express in the classroom. There also seems to be substantial consensus that Columbia’s grievance procedure at the time of the incidents reported in “Columbia Unbecoming” was inadequate.
To the best of my knowledge, there was never any public allegation that MEALAC professors actually graded their students on the basis of political ideology. The operative question from the beginning was whether students had been demeaned for their ideology in such a way that stifled in-class debate, led them to believe that their grades would be affected by their views, or were physically threatened by their professors. I don’t think it would be wise for us to get into the he said/she said of the specific allegations; none of us were there at the time of the alleged incidents, and I for one have not read the results of Columbia?s internal investigation, but I believe that there are key issues of dispute that remain even if we do not address the differences among the competing narratives. This leads to the next major issue in the “Columbia Unbecoming” controversy:
2. The effect of political orthodoxies on academic debate:
The pretension of America’s elite universities is that they provide each of their students with a liberal arts education sufficiently powerful to turn a student’s brain inside out a few times over the course of four years. Students are supposed to walk into college and have their way of thinking about the world challenged.
The challenge for each university is to determine what parameters of debate are most conducive to the mission of the university. There are academic norms of proof that each professor should be held to, and if a professor subscribes to ideological beliefs that impede his/her ability to maintain academic distance, that professor’s career, in an ideal system, would suffer for it.
To use an example I know very little about, David Irving is unlikely to be regarded as a leading expert on German history because his denial of the Holocaust seems to flow from pro-Nazi sympathies, as opposed to an objective appraisal of the historical record. Similarly, a professor in a course on evolutionary biology, if confronted with a student who repeatedly denies the fundamental assumptions of the discipline because of a perceived conflict with biblical revelation, should not be accused of harassment for creating a classroom atmosphere where such a student does not feel that his/her opinions were given a fair hearing. Columbians for Academic Freedom (CAF), the student group most associated with the charges in “Columbia Unbecoming”, maintained from the moment of its inception that its sole concern was an end to harassment of students by professors.
Nonetheless, representatives of CAF consistently injected allegations of academic bias against Israel into the debate, repeatedly pointing to the lack of courses about human rights abuses by other Middle East states and the preponderance in the department of professors sympathetic to the plight of the Palestinians as signifiers of an anti-Israel tone in MEALAC that set the stage for the harassment of students.
There seems to be substantial consensus that some of the classes in MEALAC, and particularly those taught by Joseph Massad, take the injustice of the Zionist cause as a starting point for their discussion of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It seems that much of this controversy flows from the experience of Jewish students who arrived at MEALAC classes to find that their fundamental assumptions about Israel, Zionism, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict were considered marginal opinions, if even in the range of acceptable discussion.
To some extent, this stems from the refusal of much of the Jewish community to adapt its narrative of Israel’s founding and history to the most current research. It has been awhile since any serious academic believed that Israel did not engage in the forced removal of refugees in ’48, but that is still believed in some Jewish circles. It also seems that some of the professors, especially Massad, let their ideology dictate their choices of course materials in such a way that led them to ignore many of the key issues that are of concern to many students. This was done intentionally, with the intent of skewing campus discussion, and ultimately the entire academic discussion of the conflict toward a purely post-colonial interpretation of the situation. It seems to me that this is a dangerous game for academics to be playing, one that necessarily undermines the values of the academy, but it does not in and of itself constitute harassment.
The controversy over MEALAC seems to have devolved into a tripolar debate: it’s either about anti-Semitism, harassment of students by teachers, or a right-wing McCarthyist threat to academic freedom. The unfortunate thing about the whole controversy is that everyone involved seems to have chosen a camp, and used their particular issue to obscure an interesting and needed challenge to a system that deserves scrutiny, even if the professors were on their best behavior while implementing it.
AARON WOLFE: The reactive nature of both the accusers and the accused is reprehensible. The standard stance of the CAF, that if we talk about Israeli injustice it must be wedded to a quid pro quo discussion of Sudanese genocide, is absurd. And conversely, the pro-professor stance in some of the media is being exploited by Arab-American students railing against Zionism.
But this is not the real issue. It is naive, at best, to think that one could go to an American university and be taught anything other than a post-colonialist take on Israel. It is naive, at best, to hope that the Sunday-school mythology of Israel’s inception would be taught at the highest levels of academia. And similarly, it is naive to distill the entire conflict down to the notion that Zionism is colonialism, full stop.
The real issue at hand, as I see it, is that the Jewish community must move past the “cheerleader” phase of our Zionism. We must be willing to take a long unadulterated look at the conflict, and at our state and examine its flaws and then set out to fix these things.
It is Zionist to demand an end to the occupation. It is simple nationalist nonsense to defy all criticism of one’s country. Similarly, it is tantamount to racism to classify all Zionists in one light, or all Israelis as one type of person.
This Article originally appeared in Israel Horizons (Summer 2005) a publication of Meretz USA
