“The Trial of Israel's Campus Critics,”

Excellent article on academic freedom and Middle East studies at the
University and the attacks of the pro-Israel lobby to silence debate and
discredit opponents of Israel. Please forward this article to your
friends, especially those in the media and politics. Tikkun Magazine is
published by Rabbi Michael Lerner and his Tikkun organization based in
Berkeley, California.

Ed Corrigan*“The Trial of Israel's Campus Critics,” By David Theo Goldberg and
Saree Makdisi, Tikkun Magazine,

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict remains one of the most visible
political issues on campuses around the nation. A rising level of
concern about the continuing Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory
(now in its fifth decade), as well as the precarious position of
Israel's beleaguered Palestinian minority, have been countered by
increasingly strident, even furious, attempts to silence or stifle
criticism of Israeli policy on American college campuses.

Tensions have been heightened especially in the wake of Israel 's
January 2009 re-invasion of Gaza , the consequent mobilization of
protest, and the growing campaign for boycott, divestment, and
sanctions. As the tide of public opinion in the United States and around
the world continues to turn against Israel 's policies of occupation and
repression, the response to criticisms of Israeli policy on campus are
growing uglier. Off-campus organizations -- many tied to the most
assertive Israeli lobby in Washington -- are playing a growing role in
on-campus debates. Campus activities, as a result, have been wired
directly into national politics, and have become more contentious and
infinitely more bitter. And the situation is likely to continue to get
worse as Israel 's image continues to deteriorate and as its defenders
grow more anxious and resort to ever more desperate measures to turn
things around.

It is an extraordinary fact that no fewer than thirty-three distinct
organizations-including AIPAC, the Zionist Organization of America, the
American Jewish Congress, and the Jewish National Fund-are gathered
together today as members or affiliates of the Israel on Campus
Coalition. The coalition is an overwhelmingly powerful presence on
American college campuses for which there is simply no equivalent on the
Palestinian or Arab side. Its self-proclaimed mission is not merely to
monitor our colleges and universities. That, after all, is the
commitment of Campus Watch, which was started by pro-Israel activists in
2002. It is, rather (and in its own words), to generate "a pro-active,
pro-Israel agenda on campus." There is, accordingly, disproportionate
and unbalanced intervention on campuses across the country by a
coalition of well-funded organizations, who have no time for -- and even
less interest in -- the niceties of intellectual exchange and academic
process. Insinuation, accusation, and defamation have become the weapons
of first resort to respond to argument and criticism directed at Israeli
policies. As far as these outside pressure groups (and their campus
representatives) are concerned, the intellectual and academic price that
the scholarly community pays as a result of this kind of intervention
amounts to little more than collateral damage.

We have become increasingly concerned at the ways in which scholarly
critics of Israeli policy have been cavalierly and maliciously
misrepresented, mostly through ad hominem attacks on their characters,
reputations, and careers. We are troubled also by the ways in which
academic programs-most notably Middle East Studies programs at major
universities-are being attacked as bastions of irresponsible radicalism
and anti-American activity. Our concern has been heightened especially
in view of the outside pressure being brought to bear on university
administrations, some of which seem to have yielded to coercion, even
while trying to "balance" calls for responsibility with commitments to
academic freedom. Some senior university administrators seem willing to
take for granted the misrepresentations and fabrications by boisterous
supporters of Israel , and have done so merely on the strident assertion
of those making these claims. This is a curious position to
take in the name of "balance," a notion about which we will have more to
say in a moment.

These are not altogether new developments, of course, as the dire threat
to a number of academic careers and institutional programs in recent
years, particularly in Middle East studies, will attest. Scholars whose
work is critical of Israeli policies have been denied jobs, denied
tenure (or faced a threat to their prospects for tenure), and in general
have had their lives made difficult-not because of academic criteria,
but because of political interference from extra-academic forces.
Outside political intervention by those who advocate unflinching support
for Israel have plunged one American program or campus after another
into crisis. The University of California is only the latest in a string
of such campuses, following incidents at Columbia University , Barnard
College , Yale University , Wayne State University , and DePaul University .

Trumped-Up Furor at UCLA:

For several weeks this spring, considerable pressure was brought to bear
on UCLA and especially on its Center for Near Eastern Studies. As the
crisis came to a head, Stanley Kurtz, in aNational Review Online
article, predicted that UCLA's Center was on the way to becoming today's
bête noir of the academy, just as Columbia's Middle East Studies program
had been for Israel's strident supporters a few years ago. Kurtz is one
of a trio of non-academics (Martin Kramer and Daniel Pipes round out the
group, and David Horowitz is a kind of associate) who repeatedly chide
and harry academic scholars for their criticisms of Israeli policy.

It is crucial to note that Kurtz's prediction was fueled by completely
falsified accounts of an event the UCLA Center sponsored earlier this
year, by ongoing attacks on faculty members who have spoken critically
of Israeli policy, and by thoroughly misleading characterizations of
them intended at the very least to make others think twice before
speaking out.

In January 2009, UCLA's Center for Near Eastern Studies hosted "Human
Rights and Gaza ," a panel discussion on campus to address the situation
in Gaza in the context of human rights and international humanitarian
law. One of us attended as an audience member; the other spoke on the
panel, alongside professors Richard Falk, Lisa Hajjar, Gabriel Piterberg
, and Susan Slymovics (as chair). Each of the panelists had published
extensively on this topic, and Richard Falk is, of course, the UN
Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in the occupied Palestinian
territories, and hence the global authority on this matter.

The panel discussion was only one of three events on Gaza that took
place at UCLA around the same time. The other two, sponsored by the UCLA
Israel Studies program, were explicitly intended to bring Israeli
perspectives, including that of the Israeli Consul in Los Angeles , to
campus, and to justify the bombardment of Gaza . "Human Rights and
Gaza," by contrast, was not designed to present a Palestinian
perspective (indeed, three of the five participants were Jewish, and one
an Israeli); rather, it was meant to restore a sense of intellectual
balance and historical context, by offering, in an academic format, a
space in which established scholars could address the growing concerns
(on campus and more broadly) about the human rights of a population
under devastating attack by the Israeli military. That the panel was
concerned with violations of human rights and international humanitarian
law perhaps explains why no advocate of those violations was added
to the panel (after all, advocates of legal and human rights violations
are not often forthcoming).

The talks by the four speakers were largely uneventful, being
interrupted by pro-Israeli jeers just once and briefly. The question and
discussion period grew a bit more heated and contentious. But it was
hardly uncivil, save for a mostly irrelevant rant read by an insistent
member of the Socialist Workers Party who refused to stop even when she
was asked to by the chair, and by a couple of Israeli supporters
becoming heated. This provoked one ironic and misinterpreted response
from one of the panelists to a comment from the floor about the
murderous nature of all Arabs (for which the panelist but not the
audience member offered an apology).

Now if you read the characterizations of this event published in various
outlets -- from the Jewish Journal of Los Angeles to the National
Review, the Wall Street Journal, and The Los Angeles Times -- you would
take away a very different view of things. Repeated descriptions of the
event by those who admit that they did not attend it have characterized
the proceedings as akin to a "beer hall political rally" and an
anti-Semitic lynch mob, and have gone so far -- by the time Stanley
Kurtz joined the chorus -- as to charge the panel, apparently working on
behalf of Hamas, as having led an increasingly frenzied crowd in chants
of "F-ck Israel" and "Zionism is Nazism."

Plain Facts: What Actually Took Place at UCLA:

Both of us were present throughout the entire event, we have listened in
the wake of these absurd accusations to the publicly available podcasts
of the talks, and we have checked with others present. Nothing could be
further from the truth.

A testament to the civility of the evening was made evident by the
appearance of a campus policeman beside the front stage as discussion
grew a little heated. His very presence seemed to cool tempers, and he
exchanged smiles and greetings with some audience members. While there
was applause at various points, laughter at others -- how different from
most academic panels -- at no time was there chanting or invective
hurled by the audience (that either of us, or anyone we talked to,
witnessed) or by panelists at Israel or at any other state. No panelist
called for or led the audience to chant or collectively to chastise
Israel . In fact, the most uncomfortable expression of the evening was
heard repeatedly at the front stage after the event had ended. A
well-known Israeli provocateur from the UCLA neighborhood (neither a
student nor a faculty member), who had once been involved in a scuffle
with the UCLA campus rabbi (of all people), was marching up and
down hissing wildly beneath her breath at one of the speakers on the
panel, calling him out by first name and insisting in a tone laced with
invective that he should be ashamed of himself.

How, then, have hearsay, exaggeration, and sheer fabrication managed to
replace a sturdy, robust account of the event based on actual facts? Two
accounts of the panel were published shortly after it took place.

The first was by a professional journalist writing for UCLA Today, the
campus newspaper of record, on January 22. It characterized the forum as
"a well-attended public event," and went on to summarize the main
arguments of the papers. It made no mention of jeers, chants, or other
untoward behavior (because there were none). It is remarkable that in
all the discussion of the panel that has subsequently taken place, there
are, as far as we can tell, only two links to this article on the entire
internet.

How the Internet Loves Malicious Fictions

The second article, which has proliferated widely through the
enchantment of the internet, was written by the education/research
director of Stand With Us (one of the most vociferous components of the
Israel on Campus Coalition), who sometimes identifies herself as a
member of the faculty of UC Irvine (which in fact she is not). Under the
headline, "Reviving 1920s Munich Beer Halls at UCLA," she presents an
incoherent and rambling account of the talks that fails to convey
accurately any of what was actually said (which can be easily verified
by comparing her article to the podcasts of the talks at
www.international.ucla.edu/cnes/podcasts). She also liberally adds
unsupported and indeed unsupportable assertions and wild exaggerations
into the mix (e.g., saying that the event amounted to "an academic
lynching of Israel ," claiming that the speakers "expressed hope that
Israel would lose against Hamas," and comparing the talks by four
academically
distinguished and well-published scholars to "the anti-Semitic rabble
rousing of 1920s Munich beer halls").

These baseless assertions (even a quick listen to the podcasts will
confirm that that is what they are) have gone on to frame and color the
way in which the event has been represented and characterized in almost
all of the subsequent discussions. Not only has most of the subsequent
discussion been based on this one article, no one relying on it has
pointed out its provenance or the inherently unreliable testimony of the
author, or the gap between the article and the actual talks as embodied
in the live recordings publicly available to anyone in the podcasts.
Thus, subsequent discussions -- by, it bears repeating, people who admit
that they were not actually at the event -- have followed the pattern
taken by the children's game, "telephone." A message is passed on from
person to person until, having gone around the room, it bears only a
passing resemblance to the original utterance. Only in this case not
only does the original message (itself already
faulty, given the source) deteriorate, but further layers of
exaggeration and hyperbole are added to it at each pass.

Pearls of Misinformation

Judea Pearl, a professor of computer science at UCLA and one of Israel
's most ardent defenders in Los Angeles , helped to ratchet up the
misrepresentations of the event. Pearl began writing about the Gaza
panel first in the Wall Street Journal (February 3, 2009), then in
another article in the Jewish Journal of Los Angeles (February 18,
2009), and then in yet another piece, in The Los Angeles Times. In his
first piece he asserts without evidence or justification that the event
was essentially "a Hamas recruiting rally" intended -- by Hamas, the
reader could be led to believe -- to score "another inroad into Western
minds." By the time he published the piece in the Jewish Journal, Pearl
had embellished his account further, adding the utterly fictitious
allegation that the panelists "led the excited audience into chanting
‘Zionism is Nazism,' ‘F-ck, f-ck Israel ,' in the best tradition of
rhino liturgy." What is most interesting about Pearl 's many
accounts of the event, however, is not their hyperbolic nature, but
rather the fact that he was not at the event which he has described in
such lurid and varying terms in three different published accounts. His
source (as he acknowledges in one of his articles, though not the
others) is the Stand With Us article. Later, referring back in seamless
circularity to this series of articles sealing itself from the truth,
another writer in the Jewish Journal (Tom Tugend, published on February
25, 2009) comes to refer to the event as "the by now notorious UCLA
symposium." Character assassination by self-referencing fabrication!

The mischaracterizations and fabrications of Pearl 's account,
themselves building on the unsteady foundation provided by those in the
Stand With Us piece, have been repeated ad nauseam by others as the
gospel truth. For example, although it is highly unusual -- if not
altogether unheard of -- for a university president to criticize his own
faculty for expressing their views in an academic setting, in public
comments at a Los Angeles synagogue the president of the University of
California, Mark Yudof, did just that, chastising the scholars
participating in the Center for Near Eastern Studies panel, according to
what he had learned of it from Pearl's misrepresentation of the event.
Stanley Kurtz's main "evidence" for his characterization of the panel in
the National Review Online article also comes from Pearl . In short, the
fabrications have become the public record of note, the "truth" of the
matter.

A Wider Pattern-Barnard College , UC Santa Barbara

This broader logic, too, follows a disturbing pattern. In a campaign
(initiated by an angry alumna living in a Jewish settlement in the West
Bank) against a tenure case at Barnard College two years ago, professor
Nadia Abu el-Haj was accused of shoddy scholarship by those who had
never read her work. She was falsely charged with writing about Israeli
archaeology while knowing no Hebrew, and of falsifying the history of
archaeology to anchor an argument about Palestinians' historical claim
to the Holy Land (she makes no such argument).

Analogous mischaracterizations have been made about the scholarship of
other vocal critics of Israel 's policies and actions toward
Palestinians, equally based on false, misleading, or nonexistent
evidence -- or sheer fancy. Public fabrications of other events,
including letters of complaint to chancellors, some at sister-UC
campuses, have stuffed false, damaging, and demeaning language into the
mouths of the critics of Israeli policy; twisted arguments and
intentions to something altogether unrecognizable; and sometimes
garbled, while refusing to discuss in any way, the substance of the
criticisms expressed. Like a growing list of others, we have both
repeatedly been subjected to "the treatment."

The most recent episode of this kind of distortion involves Professor
William (Bill) Robinson of the Sociology Department at UC Santa Barbara.
During the Israeli bombardment of Gaza in January 2009, Robinson
forwarded to his class on "Globalization and Politics" material that
drew comparisons between the Nazi assault on the Warsaw Ghetto and the
Israeli assault on Gaza . Two Jewish students in the class, after
apparently talking with the Anti-Defamation League, filed a complaint
against Robinson for "violating the Faculty Code of Conduct" and dropped
the class. It turns out that Abraham Foxman, director of the
Anti-Defamation League, met (under misleading pretexts) with senior UC
Santa Barbara administrators and began to pressure them to investigate
and censure Robinson. Foxman also apparently threatened to encourage
Jewish donors to the university to withdraw their financial support
unless Robinson was censured. Stand With Us -- the same outfit that
played such a damaging role in the UCLA incident -- likewise became
actively involved, organizing a massive letter writing campaign and
threatening to bring pressure to bear to cut off donations to the campus.

The most troubling aspect of this case is not that the Anti-Defamation
League made the accusation or that Stand With Us jumped into the fray so
eagerly, but rather that the UC Santa Barbara administration took the
accusation seriously, and apparently succumbed to outside political
pressure to have Professor Robinson investigated
(http://sb4af.wordpress.com). Evidence mounted of numerous violations of
university procedures in the conduct of the investigation. This
included, most disturbingly, key committee members (themselves known
supporters of Israeli policy) discussing the case privately with Foxman
who, it should be emphasized, had no standing to be involved in the
investigation at all. And yet the investigation apparently pressed on,
in the face of mounting faculty, student, and external criticism of the
university's violations of academic freedom and of its own investigative
policies. It was only in mid-June 2009, six months after the case was
initiated, that Professor Robinson received notice that all charges
against him were being dropped. No reason was cited, but the remarkable
mobilization of students and faculty against the investigation --
culminating in an uncontested UC Santa Barbara Academic Senate vote to
investigate the administration's own mishandling of the entire affair --
no doubt played a key role.

Political Effects: the Case of Charles Freeman

Perhaps because many of the same organizations, like the Anti-Defamation
League, are involved in both cases (via the Israel on Campus Coalition),
the situation in the academy has now dovetailed with that outside the
academy, and in the world of actual, hard politics centered on
Washington . In the recent speech in which he explained his sudden
withdrawal from the chairmanship of the National Intelligence Council,
for example, Ambassador Charles Freeman said, "It is apparent that we
Americans cannot any longer conduct a serious public discussion or
exercise independent judgment about matters of great importance to our
country as well as to our allies and friends." In a message published
March 10 on Foreignpolicy.com, Freeman blamed this situation, and his
own departure from public life amid a swirl of unfounded allegations,
mischaracterizations, distortions, and fabrications, on the dominant
elements within the Israeli lobby in Washington :

The tactics of the Israel Lobby plumb the depths of dishonor and
indecency and include character assassination, selective misquotation,
the willful distortion of the record, the fabrication of falsehoods, and
an utter disregard for the truth. The aim of this Lobby is control of
the policy process through the exercise of a veto over the appointment
of people who dispute the wisdom of its views, the substitution of
political correctness for analysis, and the exclusion of any and all
options for decision by Americans and our government other than those
that it favors.

We should all find alarming that what is taking place in the academy
today is an extension of what takes place on Capitol Hill and in the
corridors of (real) power. What is at stake is the process of
representation, which shapes memory, disposition, and arguably -- in the
long run at any rate -- the policy process itself. Many of the same
tactics are being used in both situations; and they share the aim to
monopolize legitimacy by tarnishing all criticism and questioning it as
inherently illegitimate and malevolent.

The Most Assertive Israeli Lobby: Dishonorable Tactics, Avoidance of Debate

It is worth pointing out that those who resort to the sorts of unbridled
and unfounded charges exemplified by the attacks on the UCLA Gaza panel
or the Robinson affair at UC Santa Barbara rarely if ever actually
engage the arguments of Israel 's critics. Counter-arguments are hardly
ever mounted, counter-evidence almost never thought necessary. The
rhetoric of response is predictable, and it takes the shape of the
familiar litany of exhausted assertions that are inevitably recited en
bloc, without any reference to what is actually being said; what
evidence is being offered; what reasons, arguments, facts, figures, and
citations are being assembled. Thus any criticism of Israel and Zionism
is treated as criticism of Jews (even if made by Jews, who are then
obviously self-hating), and therefore anti-Semitic or worse, as Judea
Pearl asserts in his piece in the Los Angeles Times of March 15, 2009.
Israel is merely protecting the security of its people; any
state under rocket attack would do the same. Hamas, like Hezbollah, is a
terrorist organization and Israel , like the United States , has the
right to protect itself by all means necessary (a right that in such
accounts the Palestinians never seem to possess). And it's not fair-or,
better yet, it's inherently anti-Semitic-to single out Israel for
criticism when there are places in the world that are far less
democratic and far more violent toward their residents than Israel
(Darfur, the cause célèbre of many pro-Israeli organizations, is often
trotted out as an example, though usually without it being noted that
the United States does not support, arm, and subsidize the Sudanese
government or give its illegal actions political cover in the UN
Security Council, let alone that there is no one in the United States --
much less dozens of well-funded organizations and an armada of campus
outfits -- actively condoning the atrocities in Darfur).

The Pro-Israel Propaganda Handbook

It is not surprising, then, given its provenance, that the Stand With Us
report on " Gaza and Human Rights" expresses what pro-Israel campus
activists refer to using the Hebrew word "hasbara." This means,
essentially if not literally, "propaganda." The Hasbara Handbook:
Promoting Israel on Campus, which is distributed to campus activists by
organizations like Stand With Us (e.g., click "Guides for Activists" on
www.middle-east-info.org), explains that it is often better to score
points than to engage in actual arguments, and offers an explanation for
how, in its own words, "to score points whilst avoiding debate."
Point-scoring, the Hasbara Handbook explains, "works because most
audience members fail to analyze what they hear. Rather, they register
only a key few points, and form a vague ‘impression' of whose argument
was stronger." Part of the strategy is to recycle the same claims over
and again, in as many settings as possible. "If people hear
something often enough," the document points out, "they come to believe it."

The Hasbara Handbook offers several other propaganda devices, all of
which can be seen vividly at play in the coverage of the UCLA Gaza panel
and other similar events, including, again, the Robinson affair.
"Creating negative connotations by name calling is done to try to get
the audience to reject a person or idea on the basis of negative
associations, without allowing a real examination of that person or
idea," the handbook states with remarkable bluntness, in advocating that
tactic. It also suggests using the opposite of name calling, to defend
Israel by what it calls the deployment of "glittering generalities"
(words like "freedom," "civilization," "democracy") to describe the
country; manipulating the audience's fears ("listeners are too
preoccupied by the threat of terrible things to think critically about
the speaker's message"); and so on. The point of all this is not to use
arguments backed by reason and evidence. It is, instead, to manipulate
(the handbook's own term) an audience precisely in order not to examine
arguments, not to think critically about what is being said. Which is a
rather remarkable approach for a book intended for a university audience.

This is precisely, almost to the letter, the approach taken by most of
the attacks on scholarly critics of Israeli policy. It matters little
what is actually being discussed by critics; the familiar stock-in-trade
responses will be brought to bear to terminate the discussion. Or a
campaign to silence the critics will be promoted by making life
uncomfortable for them or threatening the withdrawal of support for
their institutions, or most extremely threatening their very careers, or
their very employability (as happened with Norman Finkelstein at
DePaul). The less successful the initial attempt to close things down,
the louder the next round of condemnation, the more heated the
invective, the more extreme the charges, the more gratuitous the escalation.

Thus escalates the crescendo of attacks aimed at the UCLA panelists,
which now basically has them taking orders directly from Hamas, and
leading a chanting mob of anti-Semites. We have both been subjected to
similar accusations, in person and in print, mangling what we mean,
putting words in our mouths we neither uttered nor thought, meanly
misquoting or decontextualizing or partially citing what we write. It
matters not that we have repeatedly and publicly endorsed nonviolent
forms of protest and counter-action to Israel 's violence; that we
believe in justice, law, and human rights; that we would have all the
people in the promised land enjoy its promise rather than some suffer
strangulation at the hands of the others.

Unbalanced Calls for "Balance" Undercut the Very Idea of the University

Why then can strident supporters of Israel repeatedly resort to these
tactics and be taken so seriously without engaging-indeed, while
altogether avoiding-actual debate? Critics of the critics of Israeli
policy repeatedly call for "balance," assuming that every panel by their
opponents -- but not the ones they organize themselves -- should have
counter-voices. Of course, the fact that every one-sided panel may be
countered by one equally one-sided on the other side suggests that
campuses can achieve a broader semblance of balance in other ways, as
UCLA Chancellor Gene Block rightly noted in response to attempts by
Israel 's supporters to silence Israel 's critics. We don't hear too
many calls for economics departments having to hire Marxist political
economists, or (in the opposite political direction) biology departments
having to hire intelligent designers, in the name of "balance." Not to
worry, we are not attempting to open up new cans of worms! We
mean only to point out how one-sided the calls in the case of
Israel-Palestine are, how unbalanced in the name of balance. Indeed, how
off-balance.

We certainly don't recall hearing from these quarters any condemnation
of the one-sidedness of, say, Alan Dershowitz. Nor do we hear at a
minimum any expression of concern by those so volubly condemning Hamas
rockets fired at southern Israel for the devastation wrought by the
Israeli bombardment of civilian men, women, and children taking shelter
in schools and UN compounds during the recent assault on Gaza .

And when Benny Morris, Israel's most renowned revisionist historian,
famously insists that if you have to kill or be killed, it would be
better to kill, we hear no pro-Israeli voices objecting in the name of
"balance" that these are hardly the only options. Posing the issues
reductively and solely as ones of survival in terms of physical
self-defense so skews the issues as to essentially end the possibility
of any debate. But perhaps that's the very point of the claim (as the
Hasbara Handbook points out).

When President Jimmy Carter was invited to speak by various campuses,
including one of our own, after the publication of his book Palestine:
Peace Not Apartheid, Alan Dershowitz insisted in the name of "balance"
that he share the stage or follow the former president's appearance. No
doubt Professor Dershowitz speaks to many groups on his own, pushing his
one-sided position. We don't hear calls that his audiences have access
to an immediate counter-view. If balance is required in public of a
former U.S. president, is it not also to be applied to a "one-sided"
professor? And then what -- every lecture on every issue on every campus
is to be followed by a counter-lecture? The very idea is absurd.
Likewise perhaps with public forums such as National Review Online. In
his article, Stanley Kurtz makes a good deal of the lack of balance by
public forums giving voice to Israel 's critics. And yet he does so in a
forum hardly known for publishing pro-Palestinian
pieces. Be careful what you call for!

In The Trial, Kafka writes that "the charges are never made frivolously,
and that the Court, once it has brought a charge against someone, is
firmly convinced of the guilt of the accused and can be dislodged from
that conviction only with the greatest difficulty." Israel 's campus
critics are accused without notice, condemned without evidence,
convicted without recourse, and sentenced without representation. Israel
's most vocal American proponents serve as policeman and accuser, judge
and jury. In the end, those convicted are reduced to nothing more than
shadow figures, straw persons set afire by the flaming terms of accusation.

Those undertaking to place off bounds all criticism of the Israeli state
or military regarding treatment of Palestinians by automatically and
offhandedly denouncing such criticism as anti-Semitic trivialize any
legitimate charge of real anti-Semitism. This accusatory trivialization
confronts such strident supporters with a quandary. They seek to
de-exceptionalize Israel by insisting that critics do not equally
condemn Sudan or China or North Korea for violations of human rights.
And yet they exceptionalize the Israeli state by seeking to shield it
from any criticism whatsoever. No good ever comes from a state rendered
or rendering itself immune from criticism, as the instances cited by
Israel 's supporters prove without qualification.

True to our nature, however, academics as such should live to push
ideas, to press difficult points, to debate the ins and outs. As Edward
Said repeatedly pointed out, academics and intellectuals have a
responsibility not just to speak in clearly articulated ways but also to
air ideas even about difficult subjects, to venture where others might
avoid going. The misrepresentations formulated by Israel 's most
vociferous supporters are designed to narrow not just what can be said
about a subject but what subject matter can be raised at all. The
misrepresentations, the implied silencing, and the insidious
implications are not simply pernicious; they seem obviously designed to
quash any criticism of Israeli policy. In short, such intervention has
the effect of undercutting the very idea of the university.

Proposed Guidelines for Debating Israel/Palestine on Campus

Here, then, in the spirit of intellectual civility, are some guidelines
that we believe will facilitate the discussion of Israel/Palestine on
American college campuses. These are the criteria, we suggest, by which
criticism -- criticism of Israel and criticism of Israel 's critics --
should be assessed. We urge that when there are disagreements that
interlocutors be judged by whether they:

respond to arguments with counter-arguments, not ad hominem accusations;
respond to evidence with counter-evidence, not mere assertions;
focus on what is being said and on the extent to which what is being
said is supported by evidence, instead of resorting to cries of
"imbalance" and "one-sidedness";
make every effort not to distort what someone else says: in particular,
whether they reconstruct quotations out of context or quote only
half-sentences;
put words in other people's mouths, and try to portray someone who
identifies herself as an advocate of peace and justice as in fact
secretly-or is it obviously? -- a monstrously racist advocate of violence;
try to stifle dissent by threatening or jeopardizing the critic's career;
discount the numbers of dead or injured or the innocence of the dead or
injured among those regarded as "the enemy" while justifying the
devastation produced by the action in question as "necessary" even if
the effects were "unfortunate."
One other point. There have long been academic centers and teaching
programs for Jewish Studies, as well as Middle Eastern, Near Eastern,
Arab, and Islamic Studies. In the past, the best of those institutional
formations have looked to engage-and to engage across personal and
political divides, precisely-the complex relations marked by the
segregating political conditions. More recently, as the separationist
politics and their ideological rationalizations have hardened on the
ground, academic programs have begun to mirror these isolating
conditions. For instance, there have begun to emerge programs or
research centers solely in Israel Studies, funded largely by private
endowments, tending to ignore or lament or rationalize away the relation
between conditions in Israel and those in the Occupied Territories .
Such programs attempt to consider Israel as though it could be framed as
an object of study in isolation from the Palestinians (who make up a fifth
of its own population and half of the total population over which Israel
rules) and the whole question of Palestine, to both of which Israel is
in fact inexorably tied. Imagine trying to frame an American studies
program today that consciously (or, worse, unconsciously) excludes any
treatment of blacks or Hispanics.

Given the complex constitution of the region, accordingly, we consider
it imperative that any teaching or research program about
Israel-Palestine take seriously the complex and interacting ways that
social, cultural, political, legal, and epistemological arrangements are
deeply intertwined, that conditions of life and death for some turn
relationally on those for others. This entails a different way of
thinking not just about the region but also more about institutions of
knowledge formation and their institutional arrangements than tends to
be the dominant trend today.

A Proposal for Tikkun Forums

Tikkun has occupied an extraordinarily important progressive and
productive position amid the intellectual and political tensions. We
consider Tikkun and the communities it is able to reach and address
uniquely well-placed, accordingly, to promote a set of forums -- whether
online, in print, or face-to-face-designed to promote civil, respectful,
but critical engagements across the political divides. Such forums would
(and already do) provide the platforms to air difficult positions about
the Israel-Palestine divide, to critique and counter-critique without
being maligned, and to discuss alternative arrangements without fear of
being reduced to ridicule, invective, or even threat.

Such forums would be well-placed to establish ground rules and
guidelines for criticizing political programs and practices, as well as
their supporters and critics, civilly and without engaging in a witch
hunt as a consequence of the criticism aired. They would establish the
standards similarly for unacceptable disparagement of Jews and of
Palestinians, as well as of critics of Israel and the Palestinian cause.
And they would set the example for distinguishing between acceptable
criticism of Israel 's actions and policies and anti-Semitic criticism
of Jews as such. This example, in turn, would have the effect of
encouraging the major representatives of the Anti-Defamation League to
return to its historically crucial role of monitoring not only
anti-Semitism but also all forms of bigotry, without reducing criticism
of Israel of necessity to anti-Semitism.

To put off the table crucial counter-considerations is to unbalance
consideration of the alternatives. A forum dominated by those who can
shout loudest, have more access, have more resources, or feel more
insulted is one-sided and, in the end, destructive. One-sided,
self-regarding assertion is no exchange at all. In the final analysis it
does no one any good, least of all the people suffering the
consequences, on pretty much all sides of the divide.

We call, by contrast, for engaging the arguments, for respecting the
right to say difficult things, countering without abuse, making
criticisms and counter-criticisms without mischievous
mischaracterization. Without hasbara. In calling for respectful
exchange, for critical engagement, then, we are calling for respecting
the positions taken by honest thinkers. In insisting on balance and
recalibration, we are agreeing to balance in all the complexity, on all
registers and dimensions. The lives at stake-all the lives-are owed
nothing less.