Over the past several weeks, I’ve counted three pieces that have appeared in the opinion section of the Orient addressing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. After (at least) three years of radio silence on this issue, it has been a relief to discover that Bowdoin is as normal as every other college—at least insofar as its students can be gripped by this issue. And the conversation should continue—it’s time to add a little spice to this mezze table.
Two weeks ago, the newly chartered “Students for Justice in Palestine,” in conjunction with Bowdoin’s chapter of Amnesty International, brought a man named Iyad Burnat to campus. Burnat is an activist in the Israeli-occupied West Bank where he protests against settlement construction and against Israel’s security fence. An advocate of non-violent protest, he is soft-spoken, friendly, chain-smoking, and devoted to his people.
The bulk of Burnat’s presentation involved video clips of Palestinian protesters lying in the way of construction crews building the security fence, facing the dispersion tactics of the Israeli military. The videos were filled with tension and anguish. They were presented deliberately out of context (foregoing the fence’s raison d’etre—a bloody surge of suicide bombings directed at civilians), but they effectively (and somewhat accurately) presented one side of a polygonal narrative, without inciting their audience to hatred and violence.
After Burnat had finished his presentation, Bob Schaible, the head of Maine Voices for Palestine, took the stage and began exhorting the audience to support the Palestinian cause. He spoke with exaggeration, without any of the forethought of Burnat; and then he began to decry what he termed “the Zionist agenda.”
There is a big, ongoing discussion about the point at which anti-Israel sentiment morphs into anti-Semitism. The use of the term “agenda,” evoking all the resonances of centuries of Jewish conspiracy theories, crosses that threshold. It implies that there is a plot. Moreover, it contends that “Zionist” is a simple, monolithic term that has not actually fractured into many movements with many different philosophies. This term can be appropriated by Jews about as broadly as terms like freedom and national security can be appropriated by Americans. Simply, Schaible exemplified the brashest form of ignorance, also known as racism.
Now, my dear reader, before you jump the gun and accuse me of dropping this term too flippantly, please give me approximately 500 more words of explication.
There is an idea gaining prevalence in the West that Jews cry wolf on anti-Semitism. This growing trend has been fed both by justified observation and by hallucination. The observation can be accounted for by the antics of Judaism’s extreme right wing, which, like the right wing of most ideologies, refuses to account for any of Israel’s faults or screw ups. Instead, these folks have insisted that any criticism of Israel—by Jews or otherwise—derives from a hatred of the Jewish people.
However, this kvetching and insularity should not be taken as representative of the Jewish community. Many groups such as Bowdoin’s J Street U contain folks looking to engage in a constructive conversation, one that I believe is quite cognizant of Israel’s failings.
Why has it become so messy to mention anti-Semitism when other forms of intolerance are so vigilantly patrolled? Why was I discouraged so vociferously from deeming Chris Wedeman’s article anti-Semitic by my fellow coauthors of a recent letter to the editor, after Wedeman called language-sharing amongst Israelis and Palestinians “cultural theft?”
This, I believe, is due to the widely held goal of displacing non-rational, or seemingly subjective experience as a legitimate mode of expression in our discourse. Yes, we nominally encourage the legitimacy of all perspectives, but we undermine this stated intention by insisting that all perspectives be rational and respectful of every other opinion. This is quite hostile, I might add, to the central tenet of any orthodoxy. Many liberals understand this, but are able to justify it to themselves in the name of tolerance and reason, as they righteously mutter “good riddance” to these orthodoxies.
In many ways, such a disposition has done well to foment support for what used to constitute contra-traditional initiatives in this country. Initiatives like interracial marriage and gay rights, which, I might add quite unnecessarily, are unmitigated blessings.
In the name of an analogous humanitarianism, scores of liberal Americans flock to the plight of the Palestinians as a cause whose burden they wish to share in. This, in itself, is no problem. The fate of the Palestinian people ought to be of great concern to any compassionate and worldly person. And yet, this liberal outlook has taken on its own form of outrageously out-of-touch self-righteousness.
Because their concern is deemed objective, it has become nearly impossible to call out certain folks for fringing on or engaging in racism (anti-Semitism). We are advised to be vocal when it comes to homophobia and racism against people of color. But those antagonists are often the self-proclaimed orthodox whose ignorance we already detest. On the other hand, we struggle to rally our voices against those—Palestinian sympathizers who cross the line from anti-Israel to anti-Semitism—who hate in the name of reason and empathy.
As this conversation at Bowdoin hopefully develops, I have no illusions that our partisanship will somehow evaporate.
For those who claim an utterly objective stake in the matter, please remember that talking about “the Zionist agenda,” indicting Jewish hummus eaters for “cultural theft,” or (more recently) forgetting Hamas’ indiscriminate rocket fire at Israeli children is morally problematic. I applaud you for your concern, but compassionate motives insulate no one from prejudice.
Judah Isseroff is the current president of Bowdoin's J Street U.