Academic Inquiry Fails on Campus

By GIL TROY

Forward - OCTOBER 25, 2002

Jews are still cheering Harvard President Lawrence Summers' denunciation last month of academic antisemitism. Unfortunately, while identifying a serious problem, Summers' statement was superficial. His approach was more confessional than analytical, lacking in the rigor expected of a Harvard freshman, let alone a Harvard president crusading to raise academic standards among his university professors. His lament is easily caricatured as a Jewish variation of the whiny, politically correct anthem so popular on today's campus: "I feel victimized, therefore I am."

Summers failed to distinguish between antisemitism and anti-Zionism, between heartfelt criticism of Israel and vicious stereotyping of the Jewish national homeland. He also failed to speculate about the causes of this renewed and sustained assault on Israel, Zionism and the Jewish people, or to offer serious solutions.

In fairness, Summers targeted an elusive foe. Rather than focusing on the violent antisemitism erupting in Europe, or the vulgar Jew-hatred festering on the Arab street and in too many mosques, Summers attacked a subtler, more insidious poison. This genteel antisemitism begins with sincere disagreements with Israeli policy but quickly degenerates into attacks on Israel's right to exist and a slew of denigrating metaphors, outrageous comparisons and blind moral equivalences.

It is an old and once discredited game to cloak antisemitism in seemingly legitimate concerns. In 1946 Jean Paul Sartre identified this tendency among supposedly enlightened Europeans to characterize the antisemite as merely having anti-Jewish opinions. Opinions, of course, are debatable, and lead to a discussion of the supposedly objectionable traits, be they greed or Zionism.

Instead, Summers should have asked why so many progressive academics attack Israel and not a particular policy or politician, as we do when we disagree with an American action. Why delegitimize Zionism, which is the movement of Jewish nationalism, when we embrace all kinds of nationalisms? And why target Israelis, even if they are critical of their government, simply because of where they live?

The attacks belie a singular focus that discredits the criticisms of Israeli policy, regardless of their respective validity. Academics who ignore Saudi Arabia's oppression of women, the Palestinian Authority's persecution of gays and Sudan's enslavement of Christians feel no qualms about excoriating Israel as a super-villain.

Somehow, Arab dictatorships are forgiven a multitude of sins, while Israel's democracy is branded — as it was at this month's University of Michigan divestment conference — as "the prime example of human-rights violators in the world."

Scholars who are supposed to be guided by evidence lose their moorings when discussing Israel. At Montreal's Concordia University last month, former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu was repeatedly branded a war criminal, with the "proof" being a 13-year-old quotation wrenched out of context. When a "thought crime" becomes a war crime, such rhetorical inflation undermines the seriousness of the charge itself.

The attacks are all encompassing. When the United States bombs civilians in Afghanistan, it is called collateral damage; when Israel kills civilians during house-to-house fighting in Jenin, cries of massacre and ethnic cleansing fill the air — a libel which is used to delegitimize the very idea of Zionism. When Pakistan supports terrorism directed against India, few academics question the right to exist of this artificial creation carved out of the crumbling British Raj.

Sincere critics of Israel need to explain these anomalies. Israelis regularly lambaste their government without degenerating into antisemitism. But there is something about the Jewish state, and its conflict with the Palestinians, that gets Nobel-prize-winning authors to forgo their usual aversion to sloppy language and false analogies and start comparing Israelis to Nazis, that gets leading political scientists to overlook structural and moral differences between an imperfect democracy and harsh, unapologetic dictatorships.

There is, of course, much room for vigorous debate about Israel's challenges. But Summers was correct in sensitizing us to the fact that just because some criticisms of Israel — like any other country — are indeed justified, the current campaign in academia and elsewhere to demonize, stigmatize and isolate Israel is not.

Spotlighting these distortions is an important first step. As we fight this elusive, erudite academic antisemitism, we must affirm our commitment to free speech while acknowledging our communal failure to carve out room as a community for critical reflection about Israel.

We must be proportionate in our responses, choosing our battles carefully, and not responding to hysteria with hysteria, to broad calumnies against Israel with sweeping counter-charges against all critics. We must push administrators to draw clear distinctions between vigorous debate and hostile actions, as Concordia University failed to do when it banned all Middle East-related activities after the anti-Netanyahu riot.

We must demand that universities protect Jewish students from even the threat of violence and from blatant antisemitism, as San Francisco State University did after a May 7 riot when the school's president, Robert Corrigan, unequivocally condemned "a small but terribly destructive number of pro-Palestinian demonstrators" who "abandoned themselves to intimidating behavior and statements too hate-filled to repeat."

We must demand respect for our rights and our positions, and show the same to our adversaries. And we must try, every now and then, to break out of this awful clench in which we and our opponents find ourselves, these parallel universes of anger and self-pity.

We must periodically reexamine our core assumptions, just as we challenge others to examine theirs. A commitment to the academic life ultimately requires a progressive leap of faith that knowledge, logic and the life of the mind can improve the world. We need to do what we can to make our campuses centers of free and vigorous inquiry, not bastions of competing orthodoxies, trusting in the hope that truth will eventually prevail.

The second printing of Gil Troy's latest book, "Why I Am A Zionist: Israel, Jewish Identity and the Challenges of Today" (Bronfman Jewish Education Centre), was recently released.