What have the Palestinians ever done to deserve your support?
It's the question I want to ask every flag waving, Free Palestine-chanting, keffiyeh-wearing student protester.
I wonder what they would answer. They can't say 'suffer', can they? I support the Palestinian People because they suffer. That makes no sense. They deserve our sympathy because they suffer, that's the appropriate human response. We should always try to alleviate the suffering of others. Feed them when they are hungry. Provide them shelter etc. What does that have to do with demanding divestment from Israeli companies?
The student might answer, I support the Palestinian People's right of self-determination. Okay, that makes sense, and I guess that would extend to the right of the Jewish People to self-determination? But that wouldn't be my response - I want to keep the conversation going. My response would be, just because you have a right to something, does it necessarily mean you should be supported to exercise that right? You may have the right of free speech, but if you chose to use that right to slander and encourage violence against others, you shouldn't be supported. With rights come responsibility. It’s no different with the right of self-determination.
Then I'd have to raise, with my student protester friend, the example of Jewish self-determination, but only for comparative purposes.
Some people believe Jewish self-determination emerged from their suffering during the Holocaust. That's a common fallacy. It wasn’t their victimization that earned them the support of the world community for a Jewish State. The process of Jewish political self-determination was well under way more than 50 years before the Nazis swept to power in Germany. Beginning in the late 19th century the Jews established the organizations that would eventually lead to institutional self-governance. They worked tirelessly developing visionary, responsible leadership and building a program that would earn international support. Of course, it helped that much of their organizational know-how grew out of modern European democratic values and traditions.
The Palestinian record looks very different. What we recognize as the beginnings of Palestinian national aspirations arguably emerged, not from the displacement and exile precipitated by the Israeli War of Independence, as many think, but by the anti-colonial pan-Arabist movement of the early 1960s. Some argue that the Palestinian Arab revolts of 1936-39 in response to European Jewish immigration to Palestine under the British Mandate is a more apt starting point. But these popular revolts were disorganized and don't express a coherent movement with explicit aspirations for Palestinian statehood. That only came about with Yasser Arafat and the founding of the PLO in 1964.
Unlike the Jews, for whom the cloak of European victimhood was a garment the modern Israeli was in a rush to shed, Palestinians continued to wrap themselves up in the identity of oppression. In fact it was the stated justification for their terrorism. When the PLO hijacked airplanes, bombed buildings and took hostages in 1970s, they claimed that their violence was an expression of anti-colonialist desperation. The throughline from PLO terrorist violence and hostage-taking to Hamas violence and hostage-taking is painfully easy to draw. While the PLO had a Marxist orientation, the current Palestinian resistance is Jihadist. Same drink, new flavour. The bottom line is that the Palestinians have failed every test of political leadership and responsibility presented them.
I’m not arguing, as some have, that Palestinians aren’t a ‘real’ People. There are no historical, cultural or religious prerequisites for Peoplehood. A People with national aspirations have a right to define themselves. I am trying to argue that having national aspirations for self-determination is simply not enough. A group has to demonstrate the responsibilities and leadership required for self-determination to merit support for statehood. The kids on campus are enamoured by the romance of Palestinian victimhood, rebellion and violence. Call me old fashioned, but I’d try to impress upon the university students that support for a political cause is one of those things that has to be earned to be deserved.
Excellent post! Worthy of publishing in a newspaper or similar venue that would get more eyes on it.
ReplyDeleteAs you have so elegantly argued, my sense is that most of these kids have no idea of the nuanced history of the region and the peoples that populate it. When the source of their knowledge is google, youtube and instagram, and when the algorithms for each of these "sources" keeps feeding them the same information with the same biases over and over again, what can you expect?
DeleteThank you! You have my permission to link to it to anyone who you might think would benefit. I’ve just started on Allan Bloom’s classic The Closing of the American Mind, so I have students (and teachers) on my mind. Knowing you, you probably read it back in the 80s when it came out. Of course I agree with many of his principal arguments and they are remarkably prescient, reminding us that universities have been in a downward slide for two generations now at least. But I also find that he understates the problem. He accurately sees a cultural and intellectual vacuousness in our youth but doesn’t necessarily fully anticipate the vacuum being filled by politically correct dogmas and intolerance. Also, I wish he wasn’t such a snob and his style wasn’t so turgid. There’s an absolutely hilarious chapter about how rock and roll music has rotted the minds of youth (my shorthand). His take on Mick Jagger as the high priest of low culture is gut-splittingly funny. He hasn’t mentioned Dylan yet, but I can imagine what he’d say.
There is a lot of symbolic language floating around campus that obfuscates rather than illuminates. I mean by this that folks are caught up in something I perceive as like a film-set town - and a script made of cutouts, images not substance; irrealities not actual things. I cannot grasp how my colleagues can support the metoo movement yet also the poisonous misogyny of Hamas. Only in the slippery logic of symbolic speech are they enabled (IMO) to express support for their sisters in Tehran on one hand and yet wish mayhem (or just relabel and defuse it when it happens) on the women of Israel.
ReplyDeleteI like the way you analogize David. The symbolic/ two-dimensionality of the protest. Very adolescent, romantic and Ivory Tower. Doesn't detract from the fact that symbols can be very powerful and emotive, which is after all, the the pitch on which political games are played. No depth of understanding or consistency of thought is required. Only a sense of self-righteousness, which academics (and religious authorities) seem to specialize in these days.
DeleteReminding myself of something I read in grad school by a writer I loved at the time: Yukio Mishima. He devoted his life to words, but felt “In its essence, any art that relies on words makes use of their ability to eat away—of their corrosive function—just as etching depends on the corrosive power of nitric acid. Yet the simile is not accurate enough; for the copper and the nitric acid used in etching are on a par with each other, both being extracted from nature, while the relation of words to reality is not that of the acid to the plate. Words are a medium that reduces reality to abstraction for transmission to our reason, and in their power to corrode reality inevitably lurks the danger that the words themselves will be corroded too. It might be more appropriate, in fact, to liken their action to that of excess stomach fluids that digest and gradually eat away the stomach itself.”
ReplyDeleteCoincidentally I'm reading Plato's Phaedrus. As you probably know, there's a fascinating section when Socrates discusses the nature and impact of writing recounting a myth about the Egyptian god Thoth, the inventor of writing, and the king Thamus. He says Thoth presented writing as a gift to the Egyptian people, claiming it will make them wiser. However, Thamus responds skeptically, arguing that writing will actually have the opposite effect, that writing will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls because they will rely on external symbols rather than their own memories. Instead of fostering true knowledge, writing provides the appearance of wisdom, as people will be able to recall information without understanding it deeply, which in essence makes it worse than not writing. He also raises concerns about the written word's ability to convey true knowledge, suggesting that writing as a mere tool that can mislead people into thinking they know more than they do (like stomach acid?), because it locks in an appearance (like an acid into copper?), it does not engage in dialogue, clarify meaning, or respond to questions. The pursuit of wisdom must be a dynamic process. Maybe this relates?
DeleteLove that.
ReplyDelete