This But That: Musings on Israel and Palestine

Curmie’s personal Facebook page lists his political affiliation as “Contrarian,” or at least it used to do so; that piece of information seems to have vanished, and there are more important things to do than investigate further.  That self-description holds, whether it’s visible to others or not. 

I was never in my adult life more conservative than when living in the small Iowa town that hosts the largest Democratic caucus in the state; whereas there were significant right-wing voices among my colleagues on the faculty of the small college where I taught, they were definitely in the minority.  

Nor have I ever been more liberal than when living in an East Texas Congressional district that elected and kept re-electing Louie Gohmert, often by landslide margins. (He’d still be my Congresscritter except for an ill-fated run for Texas Attorney General).

What this suggests is that when surrounded by largely one-sided rhetoric, Curmie tends to see the flaws in that perspective magnified relative to its strengths.  Whether that’s an admirable exercise in critical thinking or merely a stubborn petulance at being told what to believe sort of doesn’t matter.  It is what it is.

Curmie is also, of course, trained in theatre, and has taught over two dozen sections of acting classes, most of them grounded in the Stanislavsky system of beginning with a character’s objective.  This approach is especially useful in playing antagonists or even villains: they aren’t evil (necessarily, at least), they just see the world a little differently.  The world is a complicated place, and pretending that it is otherwise leads to potentially dangerous oversimplification.

Context matters, in other words.  Always.  That doesn’t mean that context is all that matters, or that every rationale for an action (or inaction) is legitimate—logically, legally, morally, or ethically.  Nor does it mean that just because we agree with a perspective with respect to Issue X, we are unable to disagree about Issue Y.  It is possible, for example, to say that the Biden presidency has been largely unsuccessful and still think it’s better than any of the alternatives currently presenting themselves.  It’s possible to acknowledge that there is considerable corruption in Ukraine and still support them in their struggle against Russian aggression.  And so on.

It is also possible to grant that allegations that Israel’s treatment of Palestinians shares some similarities with apartheid have some merit (the fact that these screeds are generally overblown does not mean they’re entirely fabricated) while also condemning without the slightest hesitancy or reservation the recent attacks by Hamas against Israeli citizens (and those from other countries, including the US).  Rape, murder, and kidnapping of non-combatants, of children and the elderly, cannot be countenanced under any circumstances whatsoever.  Curmie won’t go into details here, Gentle Reader.  You’ve probably been following this story as closely as he has, and there comes a point at which the sheer horror of the situation defies description.

And then, of course, there was the reaction, or, rather, series of reactions.  The Israeli military launched a massive bombing attack on Gaza, dropping nearly as many bombs on that small area in less than a week as the US employed in the entirety of Operation Desert Storm.  They cut off electricity to the region.  They imposed a mass and immediate migration. 

The Israelis (both here and throughout this essay, Curmie uses this term to refer to the Israeli government, not the citizenry) claim with no little justification to be defending their territory and their citizenry.  Also (of course) they claimed to be attacking Hamas installations rather than Gaza in general.  That said, there has been no little death and destruction suffered by people who had no part in the attacks in Israel.  Are the Israelis the “good guys” here?  No.  They’re the less despicable guys. 

Another response, of a different kind, was that of both the international left and a bunch of unthinking post-adolescents.  Blaming the situation wholly on Israel is profoundly stupid, yet so many individuals and organizations have effectively become spokespeople for terrorism.  This is not, of course, a unanimous response of the left any more than suggesting that all Jews want Gaza obliterated.  As a friend of Curmie, a man well to Curmie’s left politically, posted on Facebook, “When the topic turns to Israel, I step away from the Left.”

One of the biggest sources of headlines comes from Harvard, where some 30+ student organizations signed off on a proclamation declaring Israel to be “entirely responsible” for the Hamas attack.  Making the obvious point that the Hamas attack “did not occur in a vacuum,” the statement then proclaims that “The apartheid regime is the only one to blame.”  Uh… no.

But here’s the thing: many members of those student organizations didn’t even know that such a statement was even being considered until after it had been signed in their name.  “We didn’t read or understand what we were signing” is a pretty lame excuse for an Ivy League student; “We didn’t even know it was happening,” on the other hand, is legitimate.

Some brief observations:

1. Sometimes things that appear simple are actually complex.  There’s a good and—from Curmie’s perspective, at least—balanced discussion of some of this over at TheConversation.com.

2. Does the mere presence of non-Muslim visitors at the Al-Aqsa Mosque constitute a “desecration”?  Curmie’s definition of the term would require a higher threshold, but he’s an agnostic of Christian heritage, so what does he know?

3. Policies of the Netanyahu regime in particular no doubt had a triggering effect, indirectly precipitating the Hamas attack. 

4.Sometimes things that appear complex are actually simple.  There is no excuse, none, for what Hamas did.  Context is one thing; excuses are another.

5.There’s a difference between collateral damage and specifically targeting civilians.  That does provide context (there’s that word again), but there’s also a point at which knowing in advance that the collateral damage will be catastrophic becomes relevant.

6. It is virtually certain that Hamas takes shelter among innocent civilians, so any attack on Gaza will have civilian casualties.  Both sides know this.  Neither seems much to care.

7. Hamas’s energy, indeed its very existence, is defined negatively.  It is focused exclusively on the elimination of Israel (and perhaps of Jews in general), not on improving the lives of Palestinians.  This is one of the few points on which Curmie will brook no denial.

8. Silence is not always complicity.  Taking some time to organize ours thoughts—for those of us privileged enough to not be directly affected, at least—would seem a better option than saying something you’ll regret.  Not having words is not a moral or ethical failing. 

9.The same people who (rightly) argued that criticism of Barack Obama wasn’t inherently racist or of Hilary Clinton inherently sexist are now suggesting that criticism of the Israeli government is, in fact, inherently anti-Semitic.  It isn’t.  Nor is criticism of Hamas inherently Islamophobic. 

10. Lots of people in Israel don’t support their government’s policies with respect to Palestine; lots of people in Gaza don’t support brutality against Jews.

11. Kids in Gaza are just as innocent as those in Israel.

12. You can be a member of a group without supporting everything that group does.  No elected officials in a real democracy are ever supported by all their constituents, or even without reservations by their supporters.  Any American who can’t or won’t acknowledge the failures of the candidate they voted for in a recent election is not worthy of consideration.  Anyone who merely parrots the party line—any party line—is unworthy of consideration. 

13. It is not merely illogical but unethical to blame (or praise, for that matter) all members of a group for something the majority or the power-mongers do.  American citizens aren’t responsible for what our military does just because a slight majority of voters (as opposed to citizens) elected the Commander-in-Chief.  The same logic applies both to Israeli citizens and to residents of Gaza.

14. Simply being a member of a group—a local chapter of Amnesty International or the Nepali Student Association, for example—which has hitherto not done anything stupid regarding Israel and Gaza should not lead to doxing.  People who make decisions are responsible for those decisions; people who don’t even know a decision is being made are not. 

15. We can count on some self-important CEO (the usual apologies for redundancy) to engage in preening twatwaffledom in any circumstance.  No one should accept a job with a boss who engages so freely and publicly in proclaiming guilt by association.  Curmie is looking at you, Bill Ackman.

16. We are placed in the unfortunate situation of having to believe news reports, which, given the sloth of most journalists and editors, are often misleading if not outright prevarications.  Skepticism is definitely in order.

17. To the extent that such poor journalism is the result of bias rather than garden variety incompetence, it tends to backfire.  The truth has a nasty way of finding its way to the light, and uncovering false allegations (e.g., of an Israeli attack on a Gaza hospital) tends to discredit subsequent, accurate, reporting from the same source.

18. The only hope for the situation not getting worse is the release of the hostages.  We can be shocked by Israel’s response, but we cannot reasonably condemn it out of hand.  Horrific and appropriate are not always contradictory terms.

19. Should this release occur and the assault on Gaza continue, the Israeli government bears the responsibility for the continued carnage.

20. Curmie doubts that #19 is likely to happen.  Alas.

21. It is possible to support Palestinians and still condemn Hamas’s slaughter of innocent people.  How do I know?  The guy I see in the mirror does both.

The Revenge of the Wackadoodles

 

One of my favorite lines from the late singer/songwriter Warren Zevon is “Just when you thought it was safe to be bored / Trouble waiting to happen.” That lyric came to mind when I happened across an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education titled “Hamline President Goes on the Offensive.”  Well, that lyric and one of my most oft-used phrases, “Oh, bloody hell!”. 

This rather lengthy article—over 3000 words—deserves to be read in its entirety, even though it may involve a (free but annoying) registration process, but I’ll try to hit the highlights here. The author is Mark Berkson, the Chair of the Religion Department at Hamline University. His was for a very long while the only voice, or at least the only audible one, on the Hamline campus to come to the defense of erstwhile adjunct art history professor Erika López Prater as she was being railroaded by the school’s administration on absurd charges of Islamophobia. 

You may recall the incident, Gentle Reader. Dr. López Prater was teaching a course in global art history, in which she showed images of a couple of paintings depicting the prophet Muhammad. Recognizing that there are some strains of Islam in which viewing such images is regarded as idolatrous, she made it clear both in the course syllabus and on the day of the lecture in question that students who chose not to look at those particular photos were free not to do so, without penalty. 

Ah, but that left too little room for victimhood. So student Aram Wedatalla blithely ignored those warnings and (gasp!) saw those images… or at least she says she did, which is not necessarily the same thing. Wounded to the core by her own sloth and/or recklessness, she then howled to the student newspaper and, urged on by Nur Mood, the Assistant Director of Social Justice Programs and Strategic Relations (also the advisor to the Muslim Student Association, of which Wedatalla was president), to the administration. The banner was then raised high by one David Everett, the Associate Vice President of Inclusive Excellence. (Those folks at Hamline sure do like their pretentious job titles, don’t they?) 

Anyway, Everett proclaimed in an email sent to literally everyone at Hamline that López Prater had been “undeniably inconsiderate, disrespectful and Islamophobic.” To be fair, he didn’t identify her by name, but there weren’t a lot of folks teaching global art history. Everett was just getting warmed up. He subsequently co-authored, or at least jointly signed, a statement with university president Fayneese Miller that “respect for the observant Muslim students in that classroom should have superseded academic freedom.” Not at any university worthy of the name, it shouldn’t. Anyway, López Prater was de facto fired, because destroying the careers of scholars for even imaginary offenses has become a blood sport for administrators (and, in public colleges, for politicians). 

There followed a not insignificant period in which the university administration was justly savaged for their disregard for facts or for due process, and for the hypocrisy of their actions, which clearly contradicted the university’s pretensions to upholding academic freedom. These denunciations came not only from other art historians, but also from such organizations as the American Association of University Professors, the National Association of Scholars, the Federation for Individual Rights and Expression, the American Freedom Alliance, PEN America, and (oh, yeah…) the Muslim Public Affairs Council. It wasn’t pretty, but it was richly deserved. 

Finally, far too late and far too insincere, there was a sheepish admission that calling López Prater “Islamophobic” was “flawed.” Any with more cranial capacity than a turnip would say “freaking ridiculous,” but hey, it’s a step, right? 

This torrent of negative publicity no doubt also helped to catalyze a number of other faculty to evolve from their invertebrate state and join Professor Berkson in defense of López Prater’s perfectly reasonable pedagogy. The faculty, now with the courage engendered by a very one-sided national response to events at Hamline, ultimately voted overwhelmingly to demand that President Miller resign. Also, of course, López Prater sued the university. As far as I can determine, that case is ongoing. 

Like a lot of other people, I thought, despite some reservations, that it was now “safe to be bored,” to coin a phrase. The matter was now in the hands of the Trustees, and the only hope to salvage any scraps of what legitimacy Hamline may once have enjoyed would be to show Miller the door, taking Everett and Mood with her. They did not do so, of course. Instead, they behaved like Trustees (Regents, Councilors, whatever) have done at every place I ever worked in career that stretched into six decades, from the ‘70s to the ‘20s: they couldn’t admit that they were the folks who hired Miller and that they’d made a mistake. They punted, as such craven and often anti-intellectual bodies are wont to do. 

So Miller is still in place until she retires “early” in June. Of course, she says, the events of the last year or so had no effect on the decision to retire. Oh, and “No one was let go for showing an image.” Also, that Nigerian prince is absolutely above-board. Just so you know.  (Okay, maybe that last part is made up.)

But there was, to quote Zevon, trouble waiting to happen. A couple of weeks ago, Miller and her minions presented a forum with the heady (but, of course, misleading) title “Academic Freedom and Cultural Perspectives: Challenges for Higher Ed Today and Tomorrow.” An actual discussion offering different perspectives on how to weigh the sometimes competing values of academic freedom and respect for cultural differences would be welcome. But such things almost never happen. There’s virtually always a point of view imposed from above; in my experience, this “correct” position is seldom… well… correct. 

This event, at least according to Professor Berkson, whom I tend to believe, was staged for no reason other than to excuse the inexcusable behavior of the Hamline administration. The first two people to speak: Everett and Miller. The latter declared that this was an “offensive” move. She pronounced it to contrast it with “defensive,” although stressing the second syllable would almost certainly have made her statement more accurate. 

She claimed that the real threat to academic freedom was happening in places like Florida and Texas. Well, she’s right that there are threats in those places: just because some of the allegations are exaggerated doesn’t mean there isn’t legitimate cause for concern… or, indeed, for anger. But the idea that Miller and her ilk are somehow innocent because others are guilty, too? No, that argument has no merit. Dr. Berkson is kinder than I would be when he writes that “Miller fails to see that there are many ways that academic freedom can be threatened.” 

Anyway, the two major culprits in the art history debacle served to introduce the keynote speaker, Michael Eric Dyson. Dyson is an intelligent, well-educated man (PhD from Princeton), and an eloquent speaker. He is best known for his ongoing rhetoric that blacks in this country continue to suffer from centuries of ongoing oppression. (Perhaps that’s why his net worth is estimated at a paltry $5 million?) 

His speech, writes Berkson, made some useful points, but ultimately he contributed to what Berkson calls “essentially a full-throated defense of the administration’s actions against López Prater.” “If I got Muslim students,” Dyson said, “and I know what upsets them, I got the freedom to show what I want to show, but why would you? What’s your point? What’s your intention?” Berkson, himself an authority on Islam, responds:

It is clear that López Prater had no intent to upset anyone. She was teaching an important work of Islamic art, which is part of her job. She showed concern for her Muslim students by giving them multiple warnings, in writing and orally, to avert their eyes when she showed the image if they so wanted. This is nothing like the examples — some given more than once by many speakers at the event — of Holocaust denial, flat earth theory, fomenting an insurrection, and using the N-word in the classroom. None of these absurdly inappropriate disanalogies are remotely similar to the challenge that arose in López Prater’s art history class and that many of us regularly face — responsibly teaching relevant and suitable academic content that might be disturbing to some students.

Note to Dr. Dyson: don’t ask rhetorical questions if there’s somebody ready to answer them.

There followed a panel discussion featuring three bused-in speakers: Stacy Hawkins (her bio on the Rutgers law school website features the word “diversity” a dozen times, if that gives you an idea of her priorities), anti-racist activist Tim Wise, and Robin DiAngelo (whose books include such titles as White Fragility and Nice Racism). The sole representative of Hamline faculty was political scientist David Schultz; given the fact that Miller would rather chew on razor blades that allow Berkson a forum, Schultz is a more than reasonable representative of a professoriate more interested in developing students’ analytical skills than in inculcating them with a particular perspective. 

Berkson has a lot more to say in his article—about power dynamics involving administrators, faculty (with sub-categories of tenured, tenure-track, and adjunct) and students; about the fact that none of the panelists (except Schultz) addressed the López Prater case even obliquely; about the casual assumption on the part of the guest panelists (and the Hamline administration) that faculty don’t actually care about their students’ well-being; about the distinction between freedom of speech and academic freedom; about the fact that the AAUP recognizes the delicate balance between academic freedom and respect for differing perspectives, but nonetheless describes the actions of the Hamline administration as running a “de facto campaign of vilification” against López Prater based on an “inaccurate and harmful understanding of the nature of academic freedom in the classroom.” 

I do urge you to read Berkson’s entire article if this topic interests you at all. But I’ll close with this: university students are old enough to contemplate ideas that may make them uncomfortable. Perhaps these different perspectives are grounded in race, or religion, or gender, or politics—for these purposes, it doesn’t matter. Trying new things is sometimes scary, and the intellectual terrain that must be crossed can be something of a minefield, but negotiating those hazards is imperative for faculty and students alike. 

Figuring out how to make that crossing successfully is not merely an admirable goal; it is a necessary one. Colloquia featuring different approaches are desperately needed. And there are any number of examples of situations in which there’s a legitimate argument for both sides of an argument (e.g., if López Prater hadn’t offered students the ability to opt out). This isn’t it. Stacking the deck with speakers eager to defend an indefensible position isn’t helpful; it’s the equivalent of defending Lauren Boebert or Jamaal Bowman for their recent headline-making misadventures.

Professor Berkson closes by citing Professor Schultz, who said of the conversation: “Our discussion here about diversity and academic freedom ... is probably at the most superficial level that we can have. … At the end of the day, let’s have a real discussion.”  Berkson comments simply, “Amen.”  

“Amen,” indeed.

Note: as has often been the case of late, this post, or one very like it except for a couple of stylistic edits, first appeared on the Ethics Alarms page.