Zionism vs. Intellectual Freedoms on American College Campuses
......... by David Green May 15, 2005
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It has become obvious during the course of this academic year (2004-05)—if it was not already—that campus advocacy of Zionist ideology and Israeli state interests is shamelessly repressive of open and respectful discourse based on high standards of evidence, argument, and morality. This repression targets basic 1st Amendment freedoms of speech, assembly, and press; academic and more general intellectual freedoms; and—most crucially—the political freedom to translate well-documented truths and carefully considered moral judgments into advocacy and activism. Like the struggle in Israel and Palestine, conflict on college campuses has an asymmetrical quality. On one side is a vigilant, proactive, and well-funded campaign by Israeli and Jewish-American organizations in support of the policies of the Israeli government, and the funding of those policies by the U.S. government. On the other side is a campaign to disseminate information regarding the history and reality of the Israel/Palestine conflict that has rightfully been incorporated into the conventional wisdom of scholarship, international law, and the reports of major human rights organizations. But unlike the struggle in the Middle East, supporters of Israel cannot use violence with impunity, and thus—in spite of blatant political intimidation by advocates for Israel—the struggle is a spirited and hopeful one for advocates of Palestinian rights, who have the much greater part of truth and conscience on their side.
Before considering this phenomenon, I would offer a few observations about the larger political context. First, U.S. policies toward the Middle East, including Israel, are driven by American priorities; albeit these priorities have over the past 40 years increasingly coincided with those of Israel, culminating in the current era of Neocon-Likud collaboration. Nevertheless, when there are conflicting interests, such as in the Jonathan Pollard case and the current investigation into AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) spying, it becomes clear that the U.S. administration will put its foot down, and that both Israel and American Jewish leaders will comply, if not without disingenuous and face-saving complaint. Second, the power of AIPAC is directed not so much at the policies of the executive branch, which are largely determined by geopolitical and defense industry interests, but at the Congress. No member can be allowed to leave the reservation of long-running American/Israeli rejection of a just solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict without public punishment, including charges of anti-Semitism and extravagant funding of opposing candidates. Finally, suffice it to say that the mainstream media, for reasons both inherent in the “manufacture of consent” and specific to this problem, make it impossible for the average U.S. citizen to understand the blatant reality of Palestinian victimization. Thus relatively little effort has to be made by Jewish Zionist organizations to shape the views of Americans in general about Israel and Palestine, especially when one considers the strenuous efforts of Christian Zionists to this end.
It is in this context that college campuses have become the primary venue, such as it is, of honest and disruptive discourse about this conflict, and the primary focus of efforts by Zionist organizations to curtail the freedoms that are essential for debate, advocacy, and action by students, faculty, and activists for a just peace. It is only on college campuses that Palestinian rights advocates can be claimed to pose even an imagined threat to the hegemony of Zionist propaganda in mainstream American political culture. During the past year, supporters of the Palestinian cause have been faced with the gamut of organized efforts by Zionist organizations to deny basic freedoms: speech, press, academic, intellectual, and political. As cogently argued by Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein, Alexander Cockburn, and many others, the primary tactic employed in these efforts is to identify criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism. At Harvard, this charge has been notably made by President Lawrence Summers and Law Professor Alan Dershowitz. This argument is supported with banal assertions of the “unique” nature of the Nazi holocaust, and by an evolving body of fraudulent scholarship and historical propaganda, including by Dershowitz in The Case for Israel in relation to the Zionist movement and the state of Israel.
The origins of the current assault on intellectual freedoms are in the most recent intifada of September 2000, the subsequent and bloody re-occupation of occupied areas controlled by the Palestinian Authority in the spring of 2002, and the need to challenge a narrative sympathetic to the Palestinians. By the end of 2002, Daniel Pipes’ and Martin Kramer’s Campus Watch was in full cry, posting “dossiers” on Middle East scholars critical of Israel . Concurrently, the high-minded tone of Israel’s claim to be on the front lines of western progress were articulated in 2003 by Israeli politician Natan Sharansky, with his spurious claim that Jewish students are being silenced on American campuses that have become “hot-houses of anti-Israel opinion.” . Since, then, Sharansky has become a favorite of George Bush and Condoleezza Rice.
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http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=35&ItemID=7864
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